Title: Disney Laced Profanity 
Author: ophelia1234 
Pairing: Rachel and Puck
Rating: T (Language)
Words: 2509
Summary: Rachel's secret tutor is revealed
Disclaimer: I don't own anything and I'm not making any money.


ophelia1234.livejournal.com/1992.html#cutid1

Title: A Rather Belated Realization
Rating: Adult
Beta: vyctori
Disclaimer: Do not own.
Summary: Sequel to A Somewhat Complicated Situation which was a sequel A Less Than Simple Misunderstanding. Yep, it's the third of the trilogy, but it can still be well understood without the reading the other ones.

He looked at her curiously, his eyebrows far from stationary and completely endearing. And then he leaned in, his fingers splayed across her back, and pressed his lips to the tip of her nose.

( 'That is fun,' he confirmed at a murmur, not quite pulling back. 'Noses are interesting.' )

Title: My Love, On Christmas Day
Author: wishiknewwho
Rating: G
Characters: Ten / Rose, OC (Kira)
Dislcaimer: I don't own Doctor Who and it's probably just as well that I don't because it'd be nothing but hugs and hair ruffling for the foreseeable future. Title taken from the song "Christmas Day" by Dido.
Spoilers: None for DW; takes place in a world where Doomsday never happened. However, if you intend to read my fic Miles to Go and don't want it spoiled, you might want to wait on this one.
Summary: Christmas Eve part three.
Author Notes: Here's the last of the Christmas Eve.  Tomorrow will be Christmas, and then that's all.

Beta'ed by my homegirl, salimali .

  Seventeen 
 

Title: The Happiest We've Been in Awhile
Chapter: 4/?
Author: reverie_405
Rating: PG-ish for language
Characters/Pairings: Puck, Tina, and the rest of the gleeks
Summary: He tried to explain that Tina was just a girl from Glee. That up until an hour ago, they barely said more than two words to each other; that between her stoic stares and fishnet gloves, she kind of freaks him out. A Puck/Tina friendship fic.
Spoiler Warning: not much...this is set sometime after Ballads.


It was about a week later and she had the burning desire to do nothing more than kick Puck in the face.


Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3

From CNN's Breaking News Twitter


Radio host Rush Limbaugh was rushed to a Honolulu hospital with chest pains, sources told KITV. More to come on CNN.com




More info

HONOLULU -- Conservative radio talk host Rush Limbaugh was rushed to a Honolulu hospital on Wednesday afternoon with chest pains, sources told KITV.Paramedics responded to the call at 2:41 p.m. at the Kahala Hotel and Resort.

Limbaugh suffered from chest pains, sources said. Paramedics treated him and took him to Queen's Medical Center in serious condition.He was seen golfing at Waialae Country Club earlier this week. The country club is next to the Kahala Hotel and Resort.The radio show host had been in the islands during the holidays. Coincidentally, his visit comes at a time when two of the nation's most powerful Democrats, President Barack Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, are also staying in Hawaii.In 2001, Limbaugh received a cochlear implant after he suddenly lost hearing due to autoimmune inner ear disease. Limbaugh underwent treatment in 2003 for an addiction to prescription painkillers, including Lorcet, Norco and hydrocodone.

Title: The Snow Queen
Author: angelofprey
Character/Pairing: Ten/Rose, Ten/OC...ish
Rating: PG (will probably go up later on)
Summary: The Doctor is kidnapped by the Snow Queen, now Rose must save him from her icy palace before it's too late.
Disclaimer: I do not own Doctor Who, it's characters, or even this plotline. They belong to the BBC, and Hans Christian Andersen.
Author's Notes: Second part of the fic inspired by Skytyne's lovely artwork.

( Read more )

Title: Breathing in Silence
Author: inspirera
Pairing: Booth/Brennan
Rating: Strong T
Word Count: 1,644
Spoilers: Nothing specific :)
Summary: They hide behind real things now.

Notes: This fic is a gift to thediagnosis as part of the Bones Christmas fic exchange, organised by the lovely zerodetorres and helped along by the equally awesome tempertemper77

Thank yous go to britishwannabe1 (y.r.a.n. ♥), christinaof94 and xo_angel_xox.


Of course it was always destined to be like this. Always some sort of barrier between them.

White House Responds To Cheney: Your 'Bellicose Rhetoric' Did Nothing

The White House responded sharply to criticism from Dick Cheney over the administration's response to a botched terror attack. In a blog post, White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer said Obama "is not interested in bellicose rhetoric" and called Cheney's jabs "strangely off-key" when national security is at stake.

Republicans saw the failure to prevent the attempt to blow up a plane on Christmas Day as a political opportunity, a chance to make the president look weak.

"[W]e are at war and when President Obama pretends we aren't, it makes us less safe," Cheney said in a statement to Politico. "Why doesn't he want to admit we're at war? It doesn't fit with the view of the world he brought with him to the Oval Office. It doesn't fit with what seems to be the goal of his presidency -- social transformation -- the restructuring of American society."

Now, after avoiding the partisan scuffle in favor of addressing the intelligence failures, the White House is responding.

To put it simply: this President is not interested in bellicose rhetoric, he is focused on action. Seven years of bellicose rhetoric failed to reduce the threat from al Qaeda and succeeded in dividing this country. And it seems strangely off-key now, at a time when our country is under attack, for the architect of those policies to be attacking the President.

Democrats in Congress, meanwhile, have been blaming Bush for releasing from Guantanamo in 2007 two detainees who apparently helped lead the al Qaeda cell in Yemen linked to the bombing attempt.

Napolitano Assailed For Not Showing Sufficient 'Emotion' In Response To Flight 253 Incident

Raw Story pulls out another objectively idiotic statement from the frantic Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.):

In the wake of the attempted bombing of a plane bound for Detroit, Rep. Peter King (NY-R) criticized Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano for appearing "bored."

"What I was critical of here was that first of all we went almost 48 hours before anyone from the administration came out and even spoke about what happened," explained King Monday.

"Finally, Janet Napolitano comes out and the first thing she said was everything worked well. And she seemed almost like she was bored to be there. There was no intensity. There was no show of emotion," he said.

( Read more )

title:  Life is Wonderful - link to lyrics by Jason Mraz
rating:  pg
word count:  1,484
spoilers:  Pilot and A Night at the Bones Museum
disclaimer:  So very obviously not mine.
a/n:  Written in zerodetorres’s Secret Santa Fic Exchange for the lovely and talented cardiogod, who wanted Booth/Brennan or just Brennan, no weird parings, characters, or genres, and prompted me with post-Pain in the Heart or Night at the Bones Museum - what if Angela and her gang hadn't walked in at the end?  Beta’d by obrien_blue and tempertemper77.  Lucy and Kate, thanks so much for hosting, and Rachel, I hope you enjoy it!  You got me to finally write something for season five, which was a feat in and of itself :)

Fake cut to my LJ

So I saw an article about this in the LA times, but google brought me to CNN.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- So long, Simon Cowell.

Time Warner Cable's customers could lose access to "American Idol," "the Simpsons" and some of the NFL playoffs if the cable company fails to resolve a fee standoff with Fox by Dec. 31.

...
On its Web site rolloverorgettough.com, Time Warner Cable claims some networks are demanding up to a 300% price increase, which will make the cable provider hike prices "significantly" for its customers to cover the costs. News Corp. countered that Time Warner Cable is a highly profitable company, and "it can surely afford to fairly compensate broadcasters for that content without raising rates," according to a posting on its Web site keepfoxon.com.

Time Warner Cable paid more than $3 billion in licensing fees to networks in the first nine months of 2009, up 7% from the same period in 2008, the company said in a financial statement. The cable company had an operating income of $4.7 billion this year through the end of September.

Long Source Here

Pressure mounting on Jim Greer to step down as Florida GOP chairman

Pressure mounted on Florida Republican Party Chairman Jim Greer today as a dozen major GOP donors from all over the state signed a letter urging him to resolve "a crisis in confidence" by resigning.

Greer, who has the backing of Gov. Charlie Crist, has insisted he won't quit. The state party's annual meeting is set for Orlando Jan. 8-9 and Greer has said he will meet with fellow Republican leaders to discuss party finances and operations.

Early this month, Greer accused budget committee member Allen Cox of leaking confidential party financial data and removed him from that panel. But Cox, the party vice chairman, denied leaking information about an alleged $4 million gap between expenses and fund-raising and organized a petition among the GOP state committee to remove Greer.

Besides the alleged deficit, which Greer says is exaggerated and due partly to the sluggish economy making donors less generous, the chairman has offended some Republican activists by taking sides in major primaries. Greer publicly endorsed Crist for the U.S. Senate and Attorney General Bill McCollum to succeed Crist as governor -- but later said he was speaking for himself, not giving Crist and McCollum the party's endorsement.

Today, dissidents are circulating a letter signed by 12 major donors -- including four former U.S. ambassadors from the Bush administrations -- urging Greer to quit.

"We do not take this call for action lightly," said the letter. "It is even more agonizing to publicly call for this plan of action but it would not have come to this had Jim Greer heeded warning calls and implemented a strategic plan of action for our Republican candidates as a competent state chairman should and would."

The letter said Greer's actions "resulted in a crisis of confidence in our party and widespread uneasiness, lack of trust, lack of motivation ... among the grassroots active members of the party, elected leadership and th ose of us who have historically rallied financial support around the state of Florida."

The letter was signed by Al Hoffman of Fort Myers, former ambassador to Portugal; Mel Sembler of St. Petersburg, former ambassador to Italy, Australia and Nauru; Charles Cobb of Miami, former ambassador to Iceland, and Ned Siegel of Boca Raton and Palm Beach, former ambassador to the Bahamas.

Other party donors signing the letter were Richard Beard of Tampa, William Becker of Vero Beach, Seth Bernstein of Orlando, J.C. Demetree of Jacksonville, Earl Durden of Panama City, Ed Easton of Miami, Mark Guzetta of Boca Raton and Charles Hilton of Panama City.

Tempest in the Tea Party
Conservative activists decry GOP consultants for dropping $1,600 on a fancy meal—while hijacking their grassroots movement.

Would a true Tea Party patriot drop nearly $1,600 in donor money for a small meal at a fancy steakhouse? Robin Stublen says no, and he's mad as hell about the profligate expenditures of a GOP political organization that has glommed on to his grassroots movement. Stublen is the organizer of the Punta Gorda, Florida, Tea Party and a member of Tea Party Patriots, a national grassroots organization that has no offices, no president, raises virtually no money, operates largely on volunteer efforts, and, most important, doesn't endorse candidates. But unbeknownst to many, there's another outfit claiming ownership of this conservative movement. It's called the Tea Party Express, and it has dominated Fox News coverage over the past year with its multistate bus tours and political rallies.

Behind it is a well-established Republican political action committee that has raked in tons of money fundraising under the "Tea Party" banner—and it has also spent a lot of that money in a fashion unbecoming a supposedly grassroots insurrection. For instance, according to recent filings with the Federal Election Commission, the PAC that created Tea Party Express dropped $1,597.29 over the summer for a meal for six at a tony Sacramento Chops restaurant, an expenditure that has Stublen seeing red.

"Six people averaged $266; that's not grassroots. I kill bugs and cut grass for a living. I'm splurging when I spend $19 at Chili's. Outback Steakhouse is reserved for Mother's Day," Stublen says.
( Read more )

[x-posted on zomgvampires, roselikeschips, and tenthxdoctor ]

Title: [I DON'T HAVE A TITLE YET] help me come up with one?
Rating: G
Pairing: Ten/Rose
Characters: Ten and Rose
Spoilers: NONE omg.
Summary: umm...it's a PWP kinda. inspired by this piece of fanart!
Author's Notes: done in one shot when I should have been napping before work, COMPLETELY un-beta-ed.

( FLUFF AHEAD. BEWARE. )

Vaccines being made to protect people from swine flu may not be so healthy for threatened species of sharks. That's because millions of doses of the pandemic H1N1/09 vaccine contain a substance called squalene, which is extracted from shark livers.

More commonly found in beauty products such as skin creams, squalene can be used to make an adjuvant, a compound that boosts the body's immune response.

The World Health Organization recommends adjuvant-based vaccines, because they allow drug makers to create doses that use less of the active component, increasing available supplies.

Olive oil, wheat germ oil, and rice bran oil also naturally contain squalene, albeit in smaller amounts. But for now squalene is primarily harvested from sharks caught by commercial fishers, especially deepwater species.

"There are several very disturbing issues associated with use of shark-liver-oil squalene," said Mary O'Malley, co-founder of the volunteer-run advocacy group Shark Safe Network.

"The deepwater sharks targeted have extremely low reproductive rates, and many are threatened species."

For example, one supplier has dubbed the gulper shark the Rolls-Royce of squalene-producing sharks—but the gulper is listed as vulnerable on the International Union for Conservation of Nature's (IUCN's) Red List of Threatened Species, meaning the species faces a high risk of extinction.

Shark Oil Demand

Although vaccines containing squalene have not yet been approved for use in the U.S., they are being distributed elsewhere, including Europe and Canada.
( Read more... )
Source: National Geographic also has a picture of the creepy gulper shark Probably not cute and cuddly enough for people to want to save it.

MOSCOW — Russian scientists will soon meet in secret to work on a plan for saving Earth from a possible catastrophic collision with a giant asteroid in 26 years, the head of Russia's space agency said Wednesday.

"We will soon hold a closed meeting of our collegium, the science-technical council to look at what can be done" to prevent the asteroid Apophis from slamming into the planet in 2036, Anatoly Perminov told Voice of Russia radio.

"We are talking about people's lives," Perminov was quoted by news agencies as telling the radio station.

"Better to spend a few hundred million dollars to create a system for preventing a collision than to wait until it happens and hundreds of thousands of people are killed," he said.

The Apophis asteroid measures approximately 350 metres (1,150 feet) in diameter and RIA Novosti news agency said that if it were to hit Earth when it passes nearby in 2036 it would create a new desert the size of France.

Perminov said a serious plan to prevent such a catastrophe would probably be an international project involving Russian, European, US and Chinese space experts.

Interfax quoted him as saying that one option would be to build a new "space apparatus" designed solely for the purpose of diverting Apophis from a collision course with Earth safely.

"There won't be any nuclear explosions," Perminov said. "Everything will be done according to the laws of physics. We will examine all of this."

In a statement dated from October and posted on its website, the US space agency NASA said new calculations on the path of Apophis indicated "a significantly reduced likelihood of a hazardous encounter with Earth in 2036."

"Updated computational techniques and newly available data indicate the probability of an Earth encounter on April 13, 2036, for Apophis has dropped from one-in-45,000 to about four-in-a-million," NASA said.

RIA Novosti said the asteroid was expected to pass within 30,000 kilometres (18,600 miles) of Earth in 2029 -- closer than some geo-stationary satellites -- and could shift course to hit Earth seven years years after that.

source

Badass. Nasa should get in on that.

December 29, 2009--Tourists feed tigers at the Xiongsen Bear and Tiger Park, a private zoo in Guillin, China, in an undated photograph.

Many such tourist attractions secretly operate as fronts for illegal tiger farming, butchering captive tigers for their parts, National Geographic magazine reports in the January 2010 story "Asia's Wildlife Trade."

On the eve of 2010--the Year of the Tiger in Chinese astrology--the big cats remain highly coveted. A dead adult male can sell for U.S. $10,000 or more on the black market. Tiger bones and penises are often used in traditional medicines, and some restaurants serve tiger meat, including, a recent DNA test suggests, the restaurant at Xiongsen Bear and Tiger Park.

( Read more... )

Aborts Liz II's 'bo-ring' Xmas message

A Brum-based DJ has been given his marching orders after cutting Liz II's live Xmas broadcast and declaring: "Two words: Bor-ing."

BRMB presenter Tom Binns was binned after listeners from the station, plus those tuning into Wyvern in Herefordshire and Worcestershire, Mercia in Warwickshire, and Beacon Radio in the Black Country, were deprived of their little bit of Yule cheer from Her Maj.

David Lloyd, group programme and marketing director, declared: "On Christmas Day, one of our presenters, Tom Binns, made some inappropriate comments surrounding the Queen's speech.

"We do not condone what he said in any way; whether said in jest or not. We are making contact with the small number of listeners who were offended by Tom's comments and have complained to us to convey our apologies, and have also apologised on air."

According to the BBC, Binns was a freelancer worrying the airwaves on a show-by-show basis. Lloyd said he "would not be featuring again".

While the royal outrage is a serious matter indeed, it's not BRMB's finest hour. In 2003, it was fined £15k after it brilliantly challenged four people to sit on blocks of dry ice in order to win "tickets and back stage passes for a music festival in the city".

The result was "four people being treated in hospital for severe frostbite", with two women and a man laid up for 10 weeks "recovering from extensive skin grafts". ®

Source: The Register
Maybe if they'd fired him for confusing syllables and words I'd understand, but wut? She is boring. The Channel 4 message from Katie Piper was much more interesting.

ETA: Turns out the speech wasn't even supposed to have been broadcast in the first place.

[17] Doctor Who (plus actors)
[06] Mansfield Park 07
[05] Sense and Sensibility 08
[04] The Painted Veil




HERE @ fionissima