So... you implant fake boar's tusks in her mouth and take a few pictures... some with her eyes propped open.... before you pull out the fake tusks and do the rest of the real procedure.
The pictures make it around the office, she's devastated, quits, and sues the dentist.
The dentist's insurance company refuses to cover the claim, so the dentist pays her $250,000 out of his pocket, then turns around and sues the insurance company for not covering the claim.
AND WINS.
Not only was the insurance company ordered to pay the original claim, they also have to pay the dentist $750,000.
Dentist Wins Case Over Tusks in Mouth
Dentist Wins Case Over Tusks in Mouth]]>By DAVID AMMONS
The Associated Press
Friday, July 27, 2007; 2:43 PMOLYMPIA, Wash. -- An oral surgeon who temporarily implanted fake boar tusks in his assistant's mouth as a practical joke and got sued for it has gotten the state's high court to back up his gag.
Dr. Robert Woo of Auburn had put in the phony tusks while the woman was under anesthesia for a different procedure. He took them out before she awoke, but he first shot photos that eventually made it around the office.
The employee, Tina Alberts, felt so humiliated when she saw the pictures that she quit and sued her boss.
Woo's insurance company, Fireman's Fund, refused to cover the claim, saying the practical joke was intentional and not a normal business activity his insurance policy covered, so Woo settled out of court. He agreed to pay Alberts $250,000, then he sued his insurers.
A King County Superior Court jury sided with Woo, ordering Fireman's Fund to pay him $750,000, plus the out-of-court settlement. The insurance company won the next round, with the state Court of Appeals saying the prank had nothing to do with Woo's practice of dentistry. On Thursday, the state Supreme Court restored Woo's award.
In a sprightly 5-4 decision, Supreme Court Justice Mary Fairhurst wrote that Woo's practical joke was an integral, if odd, part of the assistant's dental surgery and "conceivably" should trigger the professional liability coverage of his policy.
Dissenting Justice James Johnson said the prank wasn't a dental procedure at all and only "rewards Dr. Woo's obnoxious behavior and allows him to profit handsomely."
The back story, the court wrote, is that Alberts' family raises potbellied pigs and that she frequently talked about them at the office where she worked for five years.
Woo said his jests about the pigs were part of "a friendly working environment" that he tried to foster.
The oral surgery on Alberts was intended to replace two of her teeth with implants, which Woo did. First, though, he installed temporary bridges that he had shaped to look like boar tusks, and while Alberts was still under anesthesia, he took photos, some with her eyes propped open. Before she woke up, he removed the "tusks" and put in the proper replacement teeth.
Woo says he didn't personally show her the pictures but staffers gave her copies at a birthday party.
Woo's lawyer, Richard Kilpatrick, described the surgeon as a kindhearted, fun-loving man who was chagrined that an office prank turned out so badly. He was delighted with the high court's decision, Kilpatrick said.
Attorneys for the insurance company did not immediately return calls seeking comment.
© 2007 The Associated Press
A busy section of highway was closed for seven hours Sunday after a truck tipped over and spilled pig ears, pig feet and grease.
CAN'T
IMAGINE...
]]>Back on the morning of March 1st, around 170 Swiss infantry soldiers - armed with their Swiss Army Knives and rifles (but no ammunition), while on a training exercise, wandered more than a mile across the unmarked border with the tiny principality of Liechtenstein.
OK, that's bad, and they turned around when they figured out what they did.
Here's some quick stats - Liechtenstein is only 62 square miles big. The last estimate of the population - 33,987. The Swiss army is 220,000 strong. Liechtenstein? No military.
I suppose that these guys shouldn't be confused with the Swiss Guard at the Vatican...
So, which is worse - that the Swiss invaded, or that nobody in Liechtenstein had even noticed the soldiers.
]]>Here are articles from CNN just posted today:
Police say father told toddler, 'Now you stab Mommy'
Police say a man repeatedly stabbed his teenage wife, then gave the knife to his toddler son and told him: "Now you stab Mommy."Here's another stat from this article that , to me, stood out and sounds awfully illegal: Husband: 21 Wife:17 Son: 2
Mom pleads guilty to using baby as a weapon
A woman pleaded guilty Tuesday to swinging her 4-week-old son like a bat to hit her boyfriend during a fight, fracturing the infant's skull in the process.
Pilot told ex-wife she wouldn't get daughter, in-law says
The man whose small plane slammed into his former mother-in-law's house, killing him and his 8-year-old daughter, had told his ex-wife before the crash he had the girl "and you're not going to get her," the mother-in-law said Tuesday.
Eric Johnson, a student pilot who had soloed before, strapped daughter Emily into the passenger seat of a leased, single-engine Cessna on Monday morning. Less than two hours later, officials said, the plane smashed into the home of Vivian Pace, the girl's grandmother.
I've always been intrigued about flash mobs and that kind of mass demonstrations of oddities.
This is the best I've heard of recently - Slo-Mo Home Depot
Imagine 225 people.. in a Home Depot... that all of a sudden - in unison - start moving in slow motion for 5 minutes, then go back to normal speed for 5 minutes, then freeze in place for 5 minutes, then resume their normal activities... and then disperse.
What if, totally by random chance, When it came time for the "shoppers" to freeze, over the store's PA came Jewel's 2001 hit, "Standing Still" ?
What would yo do if you saw this happening?
...Then again, it can be interpreted as 6/6/6, or worse - 666...
In fact, there are many parties and "celebrations" schdules for today, like, oh, Satanic High Masses...
]]>I had heard earlier in the day that he wasn't doing well from his week-long stint inside that 8-foot snow globe-like tank of his (actually 177 hours underwater). I just thought it was all part of the stunt itself, so that it would be "even more spectacular" if he held his breath for 9 minutes, live on the air... like he was supposed to.
Instead, he made 7:08 when divers had to yank him out because of convulsions. And it turns out he's got liver and kidney problems, rashes all over his body and his skin was peeling off.
Knock it off, already. Show me illusions, don't show me abuse of your own body.
]]>OK, this is going to require a little explanation (I saw this at Boing Boing)...
You know what a Turducken is? This comes up each year around Thanksgiving. It's de-boned turkey stuffed with a de-boned duck, which itself is stuffed with a small de-boned chicken. (Check out the Wikipedia entry)
OK, now take that concept and "Easter-fy" it with candy, and you come up with an Easter Turducken...
... you start with a miniature Cadbury cream egg.
Take an peep and cut a deep, large slit in the bottom (Caution: don't cut it all the way through!)
The cut is a pocket that you shove the miniature Cadbury cream egg into (use any extra, um "flesh" to fold around the egg). You should make a couple of these, based on the final "layer"...
...One of those hollow chocolate Easter bunnies. You have to cut-off the bottom to gain access to the empty insides of the bunny. Apparently, a dremel tool works well. Don't destroy the cut piece! You'll need it to seal-off the Easter Turducken.
Once you gain access to the hollow space, shove the Peeps into it and replace the bottom.
The key - if you can do it - is to melt the bottom seam closed with a crème brûlée torch.
EASTER TURDUCKEN!!!!
Oh...
I HAVE to share with you something that's in the comments of that original post... it's a great idea for those hollow chocolate bunnies...
The Comment by VorFemme says:
If your Easter leaves you with the need to be anesthetized - take one hollow chocolate bunny (a good one - no leaky holes - you’ll be drinking from it) and bite its ears off (hey, it wasn’t a good day - get even). Now - mix Kahlua ™, milk, and Coco-Cola ™ to a pleasing taste. Pour this into the bunny. Add a straw. Paper umbrellas are optional. Sip slowly while contemplating your day. Does it still seem so bad? When empty - eat bunny…..day should seem a little brighter now.]]>This has been named the “Bunny Foo-Foo” - don’t knock any field mice over the head. Don’t drive either. A blue fairy might turn you into a goon. Or at least put you in the drunk tank with some goons. Stay home. Have another Peep ™ or two.
A found a little ditty in Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn's blog. I am always amazed at 1) what items people jump on from the latest current events and 2) how people decide to share their vision.
If you go to this website, you, too, can show up in the middle of a CNN article, right in the middle of a certain event, just like me!
]]>Also, It's Albert Einstein's birthday! Cool!
E to the x, dy, dx,]]>
E to the x, dx.
Secant, tangent, cosine, sine,
3.14159.
Square root, cube root, log base e,
Cheers for math at MIT.
... a guy standing at a urinal way too long using both hands to operate his Palm PDA. Weird and creepy.
]]>It looked like it.
But then somebody looked at the released photograph just a little bit more clearly - and realized that it wasn't "American soldier John Adam". It was Special Ops Cody, a toy doll. And if you look really close, you can see that the gun pointing at his head is actually the plastic one that came with his set.
"Was 'abducted' US soldier in Iraq a toy?]]>
Updated: 2005-02-02 09:15A picture of an "abducted" U.S. soldier in Iraq appeared on a Web site on Tuesday, but suspicion grew it was a hoax after a U.S. toy maker said it appeared to show a model soldier made by the company.
"Our mujahideen ... have managed to capture the American soldier John Adam after killing a number of his colleagues," said the Mujahideen Squadrons in the undated statement on a Web site monitored in Dubai. It threatened to kill him.
But Liam Cusack, marketing coordinator for California-based Dragon Models USA, said the picture appeared to show a special forces operative figure the company had made for collectors.
Defense officials at the Pentagon in Washington said the U.S. military had no indication any of its soldiers were missing in Iraq.
Cusack said the striking similarity between his company's action figure, which was marketed under the name "Cody," and the published picture, were pointed out to him early on Tuesday by an Arizona retailer.
"I worked on the development of that figure so I had seen the look of that head before," Cusack said. "We don't want to be the ones to say that it is (a hoax) for sure. Because if there is a search and rescue, that needs to be done."
Cusack, speaking from his office at City of Industry, California, noted the rifle being pointed at the figure in the photograph posted on the Web site also appeared to be the plastic M4 rifle included with the figure.
The message and photograph were posted on a site run by a group calling itself al-Muntada al-Ansar, which has in recent months restricted access to the site to registered users in an effort to avoid unknown groups posting messages.
The site has been the main channel of communication in recent months for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq.
Insurgents in Iraq, including al Qaeda's wing in Iraq, have been waging attacks on U.S.-led forces since they invaded the country in 2003."
Now if I had trees, a lot of really nice, tall, sturdy, "old growth" trees, I would ABSOLUTELY LOVE getting one of these things and put it up in a tree. "It’s a marriage of treehouse and sailboat technology."
Don't know how I'd get up and down, but these look REALLY cool...
Of course it sounds a bit "New Age"-y...
]]>No, I'm not saying for me - I'm saying that some scientist at Cardiff University actually came up with a bloody formula to calculate the worst day of the year!
And yes, it's today.
It seems to have some flaws, though... Christmas is a variable (what if you weren't Christian?) and you had to have attempted to quit a bad habit, like someone with a New Year's Resolution (like we ALL, do that, right?), and since weather is involved, it seams this only applies to people living in the Northern Hemisphere.
Oh, and it was coincidence that it fell on a Monday this year.
And I wonder if it has anything to do with being near National Pie Day, which was last Friday?
The formula is:]]>1/8W+(D-d) 3/8xTQ MxNA.
Where:
W: Weather
D: Debt
d: Money due in January pay
T: Time since Christmas
Q: Time since the failure to quit a bad habit
M: General motivational levels
NA: The need to take action and do something about it
As seen in this photo released in New York by Hasbro, Inc., Friday, Jan. 14, 2005, Hasbro, Inc.'s Playskool division is launching a new Mr. Potato Head figure, Darth Tater. Available at stores nationwide in February, kids will be able to have all kinds of mix 'n match,Mr. Potato Head fun with this wacky spud dressed as the infamous Star Wars saga villain, Darth Vader. (AP Photo/ Hasbro, Inc., HO)]]>