Feckoff.net

Bok has his bell-end of the week feature, so now here’s mine: Jennifer Wilbanks.

This comes from CNN.com:

(CNN) — A Georgia woman, who was found in New Mexico early Saturday and who said she had been abducted, admitted today she had made up the story because she was nervous about her upcoming wedding, police said.

Albuquerque Police Chief Ray Schultz said Jennifer Wilbanks, 32, had told them she had taken a bus to Las Vegas, Nevada, and on Saturday had taken another bus to New Mexico.

Earlier, Wilbanks had told family members and police that she had been abducted by a man and a woman in a van. She was to be married Saturday.

“Agents and detectives learned Miss Wilbanks had become scared and concerned about her pending marriage and decided she needed some time alone,” Schultz said.

Police in New Mexico said she will face no criminal charges, despite her false kidnapping story. When asked what would happen in Georgia, Duluth Police Chief Randy Belcher told reporters: “No criminal charges.”

Spokesman Mike Satterfield read a statement from the family.

“It has been determined that Jennifer has some issues the family was not aware of. We’re looking forward to loving her and talking with her concerning these issues,” Satterfield said. “There have been so many people who helped us through this and we want to thank all of them.”

Read about it here. Its fully symmetric, and dirt cheap (given the bandwidth) at the price of £112 sterling per month.

Nice.

I hope these guys win. They’re the perfect eurovision entry - click the link if you don’t believe me

I quite enjoyed this Counter-Strike themed VGcats comic today

No not THAT kind of republican.

Ruairi got his Mac mini today. The bastard.

I don’t need one, but I want one.

Apparently Microsoft are not happy with Windows Longhorn beta testers putting screenshots of the beta operating system on the web. Microsoft says that posting such screenshots violates the EULA agreed to by those who installed the beta.

You can see some here (assuming they survive). Not that there’s much of anything special about them.

Source

The Carlow sugar factory, having experienced its death in being shut down last month today had the last nail hammered into its coffin. A convoy of trucks - travelling at 4mph - hauling wide-load trailers, each 39 metres long removed most of the remaining plant from the factory, transporting it to Mallow, the last remaining sugar factory in Ireland.
Many local roads were closed for most of the day to allow the massive loads through. I had to travel from Carlow to Abbeyleix myself, but this was along the route taken by the trucks so I had to go via Stradbally… a bit out of the way.

Mike (my flatmate, for those not in the know) got World of Warcraft in the post from Play today. Given his addictive nature when it comes to games, I can see this being the death of his 4th year project!
The WoW service seems to be quite oversubscribed though, judging by the up-and-down nature of the new player registration system, plus the fact that it only offers the 120MB or so of required updates via BitTorrent (so he tells me) — and only using Blizzard’s own shitty BitTorrent client — really smacks of doing-things-on-the-cheap.
On the upside, it does look pretty. I’m quite opposed to games that involve a monthly fee for playing, so I don’t think I’ll be getting myself a copy. Half-Life 2 deathmatch and Counter-Strike: Source are enough to keep me going in the multiplayer stakes for a while yet anyways.

After seeing some cheesy American news report on Sky, with their “terror reports” and chatter about the wonderful great things America is doing for The People of Iraq™, I went a-googling and came across this.
According to that site, the current civilian death toll from the “war” in Iraq stands between 21,239 and 24,106.
I also came across the “Iraq Coalition Casualty Count”, which shows how many American and British casualties there’s been.