Neurologist. Yes, there is such a thing as a remote brain surgeon!  A Nevada Hospital is looking for a full-time neurology physician.  Benefits include:  $500 signing bonus; W2 salary; medical, dental, vision insurance; enhanced 401k plan; continuing education allowance; professional dues and licensure allowance; generous vacation/paid time off; paid travel.  Amazing!

Getting paid to wear shirts. In this up and down economy Jason Sadler has started outsourcing wardrobe (namely shirts)! He has been wearing a different shirt everyday in 2009, taking multiple pictures throughout the day, blogging, tweeting, and facebooking all over the internet. You do the math $1, $2, $3…$365! He is making a killing from home!

Metal Music Blogger. Finally get paid to Rock, from home!  This is a great occasional writing gig for a metal music fan who is very knowledgeable about the genre and who (ideally) already attends concerts and festivals. Ever wanted to get paid to talk about music? Here’s your chance!

Hello Kitty Online Community Manager. This full time position is being offered to a knowledgeable and passionate Hello Kitty fan anywhere in the world! Offered by the gaming company, they are hiring an online community manager for all things Hello Kitty.

Magazine publisher, Hugh Hefner. So this list is obviously not in order. Working from the Playboy mansion, with the parties bunnies, cars, pools, animals, and everything else any Playboy could ever want is by far the best work from home job ever! In 1953, Hugh raised $8,000 from 45 investors to launch Playboy. Work clothes: robe!

Toishanese Interpreter. What is Toishanese you ask? Well it is a dialect of Cantonese mainly spoken in and around Taishan, a county-level city situated southwest of Guangzhou on the coast of Guangdong province. Don’t live in or around Taishan? Work from home! International interpretation services hire for tons of different languages, including Spanish, French, German, and some exotic languages like Toishanese too!

Virtual Juror. Did you like being on a jury but hated getting up early and driving to the courthouse? This is for you! Telecommuting Jurors review information, answer attorneys’ questions, and provide feedback on cases. Must be over 18 and a US citizen, but what a sweet gig!

So there you have it. If you’ve always wanted to quit, or just got laid off. There is a job for everyone, and your office can be your couch!

Relieving stress in the office

A series of stupid stunts

Andrew Zimmern. Enough said. (Possibly NSFW)

And a general round-up of stupid to last at least a week

Gaurab Chakrabarti is rational.

Here is a short list of some pretty Awesome Cat Ladies!

46-year-old South African Riana Van Nieuwenhuizen shares her home with 4 orphaned cheetahs, 5 lions and 2 tigers. She says, “I love them all. But they’re a handful.”

50-year-old Nina Kostsovo lives in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk. She picked up her first street cat 15 years ago and has since not been able to let a cat in need pass by without helping it. This Russian woman has opened her tiny two-room apartment to over 130 stray cats. Video after the jump.

This is a real costume dedicated to the Awesomeness of Cat Ladies. I won’t make any money if you buy this, but I will laugh if you send me a picture.

And then there is the Cat Writers’ Association, Inc. (CWA). This is an organization of professionals in either writing, publishing and broadcasting. And to be in the CWA, what you write, publish, or broadcast has to be all about cats. Now I’m not a lady, but this IS all about cats. I might need to see what the dues are, because I’d really like to start getting their quarterly newsletter aptly named MEOW! (members only)

And finally, the great people over at mcphee.com have given us possibly the best thing ever — a Crazy Cat Lady Action Figure!

Every town has a Crazy Cat Lady. She’s the one who lives in a tiny house full of feral felines. This 5-1/4″ tall, hard vinyl Crazy Cat Lady Action Figure has a wild look in her eye and comes with six cats. You know you want it.

Believe it or not, there was a time when Jerry Springer’s show was actually less about marital problems between cousins and somewhat of a legitimate forum for discussion.

Jerry probably deserves his own post, but for now, I have this little gem for you from the early 90s.  You probably know enough about Jerry Springer, but you may not know enough about a guest featured on this particular show, GG Allin.

GG Allin was one of most likely the world’s most vile, mentally unstable, angriest, and offensive musician to have walked the earth. Here are some choice snippets from his Wikipedia page. I would read it all because it’s ironically hilarious in that “holy crap, this person actually lived” sort of way and it’s good set-up for the video.

Kevin Michael “GG” Allin (August 29, 1956 – June 28, 1993) was an American punk rock singer-songwriter who performed and recorded with many punk-rock groups during his career.

Allin is best remembered for his notorious live performances that typically featured wildly transgressive acts such as Allin defecating and urinating onstage, rolling in feces and often consuming excrement, committing self-injury, performing naked, and committing violent actions toward the audience—often doing many of these things simultaneously.

His politically incorrect lyrics, which often covered subjects such as misogyny, pedophilia and racism, deeply divided opinions of him within the highly politicized punk community. Though he had a devoted cult following, Allin’s music has received mostly negative reviews from critics.

GG was born as Jesus Christ Allin at Weeks Memorial Hospital in Lancaster, New Hampshire. He was given this messianic name because his father, Merle Colby Allin, Sr., told his young wife, Arleta Gunther, that Jesus Christ Himself had visited him and told him that his newborn son would be a great and all powerful man in the vein of the Messiah.

As a young child, his older brother Merle Allin, Jr. was unable to pronounce “Jesus” properly and kept calling him “Jeje”, which became “GG”. The family lived in a log cabin with no water or electricity. Allin’s father, who forbade all conversation in the home after dark, was a religious fanatic and an antisocial man, and was allegedly violent towards his wife and children, though GG himself never used this as an excuse for any of his own eccentricities. At age 12, Allin had contracted Lyme disease and claimed to have never fully recovered from the effects of having the disease at such a young age.

GG was considered an outcast from junior high school onwards, being placed in special ed classes and having to repeat the third grade. He was known to rebel by showing up to school dressed in drag (his 10th grade school picture depicts him this way), which he said was inspired by the New York Dolls. When asked about his childhood, GG has been quoted as saying “Very chaotic. Full of chances and dangers. We sold drugs, stole, broke into houses, cars, etc. Did whatever we wanted to for the most part – including all the bands we played in. People even hated us back then.”

By the mid to late 1980s, Allin was addicted to heroin and alcohol and general abused any intoxicants provided to him, sometimes taking pills without even asking what they were. He was poorly groomed and rarely cleaned himself. At this point, Allin also began eating laxatives before performances – as defecation was becoming a regular stage act. Allin described himself as “the last true rock and roller.” By this, he meant that rock and roll music itself had started as an embodiment of danger, anti-authoritarianism, rebelliousness but had become largely taken over by corporations and business concerns. Allin’s music and performances were thus meant to return rock and roll to what he saw as its roots, reclaiming it from the corporate system.

By this point, Allin’s performances, which often resulted in considerable damage to venues and sound equipment, were regularly stopped after only a few songs by police or venue owners. Allin was charged with assault and battery or indecent exposure a number of times. His constant touring was only stopped by jail time or by long hospital stays for broken bones, blood poisoning, and other physical trauma.

Another attraction to Allin performances was his continual threats of suicide. In 1988, Allin wrote to Maximum RocknRoll stating that he would commit suicide on stage on Halloween 1989. However, he was in jail when that day came. He continued his threat each following year but ended up imprisoned each following Halloween. When asked why he does not follow through with his threats, or sometimes his on-stage defecations, Allin stated, “With GG, you don’t get what you expect—you get what you deserve.” He also stated that suicide should only be done when one had reached their peak, meeting the afterlife at their strongest point and not at their weakest.

Despite threats of an onstage suicide, Allin died of an accidental heroin overdose in New York City on June 28, 1993, in the Manhattan apartment of John Handley Hurt and Dwanna Yount only six days after leaving prison (and three days after attending the premire of the documentary [of his life] Hated, whose director gives an account of Allin’s attendance in Bizarre magazine). He was found lying in his apartment on the night of the 29th but he actually died overnight in his sleep on the 28th. He was 36 years old. His last show was at a small club called The Gas Station in New York City. Video footage of the soundcheck, concert, and aftermath is appended to the DVD release of Hated. In his last show the power went out during the second song, after which he trashed the venue and walked the streets of New York naked and covered in blood and feces, surrounded by fans whom he openly embraced. On VH1’s Freakiest Concert Moments, Allin’s final show ranked at number four.

After arriving at his friends’ apartment, some party-goers posed for photos with Allin, not knowing that he was already dead. The next morning, some noticed that Allin still lay motionless in the same place where they had left him, and called for an ambulance. Allin was pronounced dead at the scene.

At his funeral, Allin’s bloated, discolored corpse was dressed in his black leather jacket and trademark jock strap. He had a bottle of Jim Beam beside him in his casket, per his wishes (openly stated in his self-penned acoustic country ballad, “When I Die”). As part of his brother’s request, the mortician was instructed not to wash the corpse (which smelled strongly of feces), or apply any makeup. The funeral became a wild party. Friends posed with the corpse, placing drugs and whiskey into its mouth. As the funeral ended, his brother put a pair of headphones on Allin. The headphones were plugged into a portable cassette player, in which was loaded a copy of The Suicide Sessions. The video of his funeral is widely available for purchase, and is an extra feature on the Hated DVD and some bootleg VHS tapes.

Now wasn’t that just lovely? Just imagine Thanksgiving dinner at the Allin house.

Anyway, with this in mind, I now present the semi-legendary eposide of Jerry Springer featuring GG Allin as his main guest.

For one reason or another, the danger surrounding Niagara Falls is attractive to daredevils. Perhaps one of the more memorable events to occur on the falls took place in 1990 and starred David Copperfield:

(The entire special can be viewed here.)

Obviously this clip was just one part of a multimillion dollar primteimte TV special.

Now get this. Fast forward to October 1st, 1995.  A wannabe stuntman by the name of Robert Overcracker tries to hit two birds with one stone. As a way to catapult himself into the stunt industry as well as raise money for the homeless, Mr. Overcracker arranged a stunt where he would ride a jetski off of the falls and safely land via a rocket-propelled parachute.

This, of course is not a particularly smart idea. As it turned out, that rocket powered parachute failed to open, sending Mr. Overcracker over the edge, his body never to be recovered, and raised more awareness for parachutes than for the homeless.

Miraculously, an Egyptian tourist snapped this incredible photo of the events:

Interestingly enough, Mr. Overcracker could have qualified for life insurance payout as a result of this ridiculous stunt too! I’m not sure whther or not he actually received anything, but hot damn, what a way to go.

CTIA, the Cellular Telephone Industry Association, as of June, 2008 reports that there are

262,720,165 mobile phone users in the US

Of all these users, there are

240,000,000 phones that can send text messages.

We’re going to take our first leap of faith here and assume that each phone belongs to a different individual. This probably is not the case all the time, but multiple-phone ownership isn’t terribly common yet.

So we’ve got 240 million people who CAN send text messages and as of June, 2008, over 75 billion (that’s right, with a ‘b’) text messages are sent in the US every month

Leap of faith #2: Number of text messages sent per day:

(75,000,000,000 messages/month) / (30 days/month) = 2,500,000,000 messages sent per day = 28,935 messages per second.

Leap of faith #3: Number of people sending messages per day:

(2500000000 messages/day) / (240,000,000 potential users) = 10.416 messages per user per month. Let’s round down for the sake of trying to make up for our estimations.

Maximum amount of data in one text message = 160 bytes

Amount of data sent between 12:00:00 and 12:01:00 = 60 seconds

160 bytes/message * 28,395 messages/second * 60 seconds = 1703700 bytes = 259.96 = 260 megabytes

Now let’s assume that not everyone sent a text message exactly between midnight and 12:01, and I’m sure some people sent the messages just a minute or so before midnight as well.

160 bytes/message * 28,395 messages/second * 60 seconds * 8 minutes = 2 079.71 mb = 2.07 gigabytes of data sent in 8 minutes in the whole US

The last part is important here. Our wireless infrastructure isn’t that amazing yet. We still have to connect by Wifi to get large iPhone apps. Imagine what happens if instead of the whole country sending 2 gigs of data, we have just one quarter of the country sending just as much or more data? You know what happens, because you probably experienced the phenomenon of waiting 20+ minutes to send “Happy 2009!” to your friends.

We didn’t even take into account sending multiple messages, as I and I’m sure many of you did, so the amount of traffic can probably be multiplied by at least 3-5 times to get a semi-kind-of-more-reasnoable estimate.

You probably knew most of this. Sorry for wasting your time.