Midwest Tornados

The closest I've been to a tornado is watching the tornado coverage on CNN and that's close enough for me. One reporter was saying that if an F4 tornado hit a mile away from a town that it hit, the tornado wouldn't be newsworthy. But then with 800 tornadoes in the past few months, the odds increase that populated areas will be hit. And although the duration that a tornado whirls over one spot on the ground or a building is just for a few minutes, well, you've seen those cars piled upon one another. That's awesome power. Another reporter on the scene signed off with a, "The only positive thing I can say about the situation is that it's summer....and it's hurricane season."

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By CHRISTINA REXRODE | Huffington Post

NEW YORK -- People are paying more to fuel up these days – on coffee.

Coffee price increases have outpaced even the hike in gasoline prices the past year. A one-pound can of ground coffee sold for $5.10 in April, up 40 percent from $3.64 the year before, according to the Department of Labor. By comparison, a gallon of regular gasoline cost $3.83 on average on Tuesday, up 37 percent from a year earlier.

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Tattoo Copyright

David Post • May 25, 2011 11:16 am

Tattoo artist Victor Whitmill apparently designed a distinctive tattoo for Mike Tyson’s face....and the tattoo adorning actor Ed Helms’ face in the upcoming Warner Brothers’ film “Hangover 2″ looks an awful lot like the Tyson tattoo. Whitmill sues for copyright infringement. What result?

To answer that, we need to figure out if tattoos can be protected by copyright at all — a question no court (until now), to my knowledge, has ever confronted. The Copyright Act sets out the requirements for copyright protection: you have to have an “original work of authorship,” and it must be “fixed in a tangible medium of expression.” There’s not much question that Whitmill’s design is an “original work of authorship” — if it were painted on canvas, for instance, there’s no doubt that it would receive copyright protection. The harder question is whether Mike Tyson’s face is a “tangible medium of expression.”

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Michael Levine | Honolulu Civil Beat on 12/23/2010

....Across the state, the number of Hawaii-born residents rose from 689,056 in the 2000 Census to 691,499 in the American Community Survey, an increase of 2,443 [in 10-years!]. The vast majority of new citizens are from outside the islands.