(WIDK) – Annie Leibovitz photographed Kim, Kourtney and Khloe Kardashian for an ad campaign to promote their clothing line for Sears.
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From the monthly archives:
August 2011
Submitted to WIDK by Emily Moore
(Huffington Post) — In a move that makes this Koch brother look more and more like the Monopoly board game mascot, Rich Uncle Pennybags, billionaire William Koch has purchased the entire Buckskin Joe old mining town — and is moving the town to his ranch near Gunnison, according to Westword.
In Sept. 2010, Buckskin Joe and the Royal Gorge Scenic Railroad was sold for $3.1 million to Koch, who then wished to remain anonymous, the Pueblo Chieftain reported.
According to The Gazette, Buckskin Joe’s buildings are already being dismantled, presumably so they can be shipped to Koch’s ranch and reassembled. Buckskin Joe was originally an 1860s mining boom town located near Alma, Colo. But the name and the one surviving building were relocated in 1957 to Canon City to serve as a tourist attraction and movie set for Hollywood westerns like 1972′s “The Cowboys.”
William Koch, who is apparently an Old West aficionado, purchased what is believed to be the last surviving authentic portrait of Billy the Kid for $2.3 million back in June, The Huffington Post reported.
While William collects pieces of the Old West, his two brothers, Charles and David, host private fundraisers for the world’s wealthiest businessmen and poltiticians and donate millions to conservative groups.
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Submitted to WIDK by Emily Moore
(Leon Watson, Daily Mail) — Technology giant Apple today released the cloud-based streaming service it believes will revolutionize the way we listen to music.
A beta version of the firm’s new online storage service iTunes Match has been made available for testing by developers. iTunes Match allows customers to access their entire music collection anywhere that has an internet connection.
It works by automatically scanning a user’s hard drive and synchronising all the music files on iTunes before storing them in the iCloud.
Those files will then become available to stream for free through any Apple device like the iPhone, iPod or iPad.
The service, expected to become available to the public in the autumn, was announced with a fanfare by Apple’s former CEO Steve Jobs at the Worldwide Developers’ Conference in San Francisco in June.
He told a rapturous crowd iTunes Match would put Apple at ‘the centre of your digital life’ before receiving a standing ovation.
Mr Jobs, who stood down as company CEO last week, said this would be the first time in the music industry that customers could have multiple downloads at no additional charge.
But today it was also revealed Apple is offering an add-on service to ITunes Match it had not announced.
For $24.99 all music that you own that corresponds to music in the iTunes store will be available to stream from the cloud on up to five computers.
It means users will no longer need to store large music files on the hard drives or memory cards in their devices or computers.
Speaking about the cloud service in June, Mr Jobs said it was simple to use and there were no new things for current Apple customers to learn.
He said: ‘It just works.’
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Submitted to WIDK by Emily Moore
(Paul Thompson, Daily Mail) — A doctor has been accused of stabbing her adopted daughter almost 100 times with a screwdriver for failing to wash her dog’s clothes properly.
Dr Sylvia Lee is alleged to have chased her 13-year-old daughter around her home with a flat head screwdriver.
The child suffered numerous puncture wounds as cuts from where the screwdriver penetrated her clothing.
Police said 58-year-old Lee has planned the attack and jabbed herself with the weapon to determine the extent of injury it would cause.
Lee allegedly admitted she had an anger problem and had hit her daughter previously for bringing her masking tape when she had asked for a roll of cellotape.
In a recorded police interview after her arrest, Lee allegedly stated the incident began after her daughter failed to wash ‘doggie clothes’ and a ‘doggie towel’ in the correct order.
Lee, from Emerson, New Jersey, said that she ‘got angry.’
According to the complaint, Lee said, ‘I was wrong and that’s why I stabbed her so many times.’
Police photographs showed approximately 100 ‘bruises and small bleeding punctures or other wounds’ on the child’s body from the most recent incident.
None of the wounds were deep enough to require hospital treatment.
Lt. George Buono of Emerson police said: ‘The girl was visibly upset and had some bruising and redness on her face, scrapes and small puncture wounds on different parts of her body.’
Lee, an allergist who used to practice at The Center for Asthma and Allergy in Old Bridge, New Jersey, faces a license suspension and felony charges of aggravated assault and endangering the welfare of a child.
She was released from jail on $200,000 bail while her daughter was placed with another family.
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Submitted to WIDK by Emily Moore
(Huffington Post) — You have to give Cain Motter some credit. Like millions of Americans, this Los Angeles-based artist has his share of credit card debt that he’s working to pay off.
However, unlike all those other folks, he’s raising the money to pay off his cards by melting his cards — and any that he can find — into elaborate artistic statements about the evils of credit cards. He then sells his artwork for $1,200 apiece.
As Alanis Morrissette might say, isn’t it ironic, don’t you think?
Motter’s path to becoming the Caravaggio of credit cards began when he attended college in Oklahoma in 1994.
Before that, he had grown up on a commune with his dad, a retired vaudeville hand-balancing showman, and was taught to pay for everything in cash.
Cain Motter is an artist in Los Angeles who protests credit card companies by melting their cards into sculptures that critique their methods of doing business.
“When I first got in to college, I got a lot of applications for credit cards because the card companies paid the university for the students’ addresses,” Motter told HuffPost Weird News. “They used to tell us to get them in case of emergencies, so I thought one might be good to have.”
A few weeks later, Motter received a $50 check that he assumed was a gift for him.
“I thought it was a way of saying, ‘Welcome to the family,’” he said.
Instead, it was a way of getting him on the road to being a debtor — something Motter didn’t realize until a month later when he got a bill for the money he spent.
“I went to the bank and asked for the check back because I wanted to press charges,” he said. “But they told me it was perfectly legal. I realized that if they can trick me, it’s my fault, but I decided to figure out a way to reverse things.”
At first, he tried his revenue-stealing revenge by turning credit cards into pendants and necklaces, until one fateful night.
“For some reason, I just decided, ‘Screw it! I’m going to burn a card!’” he said. “I picked up a Discover card and held it over a candle. I was surprised that it didn’t catch on fire. It just flopped like rubber and than froze in place.”
Motter discovered he was able to stretch the Discover card a significant amount and figured out a way to make it look like a face was coming out of the card.
After that, Motter started to stretch himself as well, turning out 15 card sculptures, including a working miniature guillotine and learning to shoot flames out of his mouth in the process.
But despite Motter’s obvious talent, the world wasn’t ready to look at his credit card critiques back in the prosperous 1990s.
“I put the sculptures in a show and people were indifferent,” he said. “Many people didn’t agree that credit cards were bad. I said, ‘Just wait! They’re going to get people in debt. There will be trouble in the future!’”
Whether people didn’t take him seriously because they didn’t think the good times would ever end — or because of his tendency to walk around with his shirt off wearing only American flag-themed pants — doesn’t matter now.
Fact is, the work of this prophet against corporate profit is now in vogue.
“In the past two years, there’s been a bigger market for my work,” Motter reported. “Everyone is on my page. People come by and they drop the ‘F-bombs’ against the banks.”
One of those people who’s been impressed with Motter’s work is Nicole Hill, a swim teacher in Santa Monica, Calif.
“I call it ‘Credit Card Death Art,’” she laughed. “It’s high quality stuff and very timely.”
Motter’s former neighbor, Paul Raizen, not only admires the art, but the artist’s personal integrity.
“He really lives up to his beliefs,” Raizen said. “He grew up on a commune and really doesn’t use credit cards.”
Although Motter is able to sell his credit card sculptures for a hefty sum, he only sells them when he’s absolutely desperate for cash.
“I really think they belong together,” Motter said, adding that the longer his art pieces stay together, the more historical they will be. “We’re coming to a day when credit cards will be obsolete.”
Although he doesn’t like credit cards, he admits that certain types are more aesthetically pleasing to his eye.
“I love the ones with the American flag on them,” Motter said. “I took one of them and glued a crawling Army guy on it and use it as a belt buckle. And the silver parts of old Citibank cards work great if you’re making the blade of a guillotine.”
Motter says some people have given him cards with which to create custom pieces, but he always makes sure they are from a dead account before commencing the project.
He admits he owes a debt to the credit card companies for inspiring this project, but, despite his best efforts, he is still in debt because of some unexpected expenses.
“I do have some credit debts, and I am trying to use the sales from these to pay those off,” he said. “I liken it to feeding bacon to a pig.”
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Submitted to WIDK by Emily Moore
(Daily Mail) — A uniformed police officer was caught on CCTV having sex with a woman on the hood of a car.
The bizarre scene, which was witnessed by a nearby chihuahua, was filmed by a hidden camera set up by New Mexico police to catch vandalism at a nearby property.
The Santa Fe County Sheriff’s office released two images from the video yesterday.
The pictures – taken from Santa Fe Canyon Ranch – show the officer in full uniform facing away from the camera.
The woman is splayed out on the bonnet with her jeans around her ankles and her breasts exposed.
Speaking to KOB 4 news, one New Mexican who was shown the pictures said: ‘With that kind of judgement you don’t want him carrying a weapon.’
The New Mexico television station obtained the photos after a freedom of information request.
Despite the Sheriff’s office releasing the photos over a week ago, State Police have refused to comment.
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Submitted to WIDK by Emily Moore
(Huffington Post) — There’s plenty of cheap iPad scams out there, but two con artists in South Carolina really added some flair to their fraud.
Ashley McDowell, a 22-year-old South Carolina woman, found herself holding a creatively decorated piece of wood after scammers took her for $180, claiming they were selling her a bargain-rate iPad, according to The Smoking Gun. Police are currently looking for the suspects, who were initially trying to get $300 from McDowell. (The actual minimum retail price of an iPad is $499.)
According to the police report, two men approached McDowell in the parking lot of a McDonald’s with the deal, claiming they bought the iPads in bulk. The supposed iPad sold to McDowell was packaged in a FedEx box, not the standard Apple packaging, according to CBS.
McDowell learned she was ripped off when she opened the package on her way home in her car.
The suspects behind the rip-off were driving a Chevy Impala with no rims, reads the officer’s report. One of the suspects was described as having a gold tooth.
While this scam seems pretty avoidable, it’s not the first time the “brick-in-a-box” con has claimed a victim. In 2009, the Consumerist reported that a Texas man claimed that Best Buy sold him a real brick instead of a MacBook Pro and refused to exchange it.
Earlier this year, CNN reported on a separate Best Buy incident, in which a customer bought a fake iPad that looked real at first glance and came packaged in a seemingly genuine iPad box.
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Submitted to WIDK by Emily Moore
(Damien Gayle, Daily Mail) — These video stills are taken from previously unseen footage showing the devastation beneath the World Trade Center after the September 11 terror attacks.
As New York gears up for the tenth anniversary of 9/11, this footage, taken by rescue workers, shows the eerie scenes in the basements beneath the wrecked skyscrapers.
Workers from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) spent eight months documenting the scene in Lower Manhattan as they searched the six storeys beneath the complex.
Guided by periodic shafts of light, rescue teams made their way through the pitch-black as they searched for survivors.
None were found.
While some staircases remained down into the basements-cum-tombs, most of the pathways and escalators were blocked by debris, forcing rescuers to travel along pipes and squeeze through narrow gaps in the rubble.
SEE VIDEO HERE
The footage, shown on CBS television, shows that beneath the wreckage of the Twin Towers lay plenty of poignant reminders of the attacks: crushed subway trains, cars tossed around like toys in an underground garage and clocks frozen in time.
Elsewhere, deserted shops were still fully stocked as staff fled for their lives when the landmark towers.
On September 11, 2001, hijackers crashed two planes into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City.
Both towers collapsed within two hours, destroying nearby buildings and killing 2,753, including 343 firefighters and 60 police officers.
Another 184 people died when a third plane was flown into the Pentagon, the U.S. military headquarters in Arlington, Virginia.
A fourth, redirected towards Washington, DC, crashed in a field in Pennsylvania after passengers tried to regain control, killing everyone on board.
In total, the attacks claimed 3,000 victims, and the lives of the 19 hijackers.
A decade later and the U.S. is once more preparing to remember the lives lost.
On the anniversary of the attacks a memorial to those killed will be dedicated at Ground Zero while work on the new One World Trade Centre tower continues apace.
The 3.5million-square-foot tower will stand 1,776ft and include the latest innovations in safety systems, structural engineering and environmental responsibility.
It is expected to reach 1,000ft by the day of the anniversary, and is due to be completed by January 2013.
A museum chronicling the historic events is set to open next year.
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Submitted to WIDK by Emily Moore
(Mark Duell, Daily Mail) — Some weddings are a washout – but this one turned into an epic fight to make it back to civilization.
Marc and Janina Leibowitz had the perfect wedding in Pittsfield, Vermont, on Saturday – then awoke to find the river in front of their bridal cottage was washing away the only road leading out of town.
They got out over a bridge, which then collapsed and left some of the guests behind at the inn. The groomsmen later rigged up ladders to cross the stream – but 60 guests are still trapped in the town.
At least a dozen wedding guests were airlifted by helicopter from Pittsfield on Tuesday after Hurricane Irene struck two days earlier on Sunday, turning rivers into roiling flood waters.
‘It was getting dicey,’ said Scott Redler, 38, of Jersey City, New Jersey, who contracted one of the helicopter trips because his mother, a breast cancer patient, was running out of medication.
The helicopter ferried out Mr Redler, his mother and father, his wife, and their three-year-old child.
‘The town was in really, really bad shape,’ Mr Redler said. ‘It was its own island, where you couldn’t get anything in and couldn’t get anything out. Houses were washed away.’
Mr Leibowitz, 31, and Mrs Leibowitz, 28, were in Germany, snowed in last Christmas when they got engaged and planned a wedding. Now they were stranded again, with 60 of their wedding guests.
‘Basically we had an unbelievable wedding,’ said Mr Leibowitz, an artist from Brooklyn, New York.
‘She told me on Saturday night it was the most perfect dream wedding she could have imagined. And then on Sunday morning – the weather changed.’
The group expected heavy rains but thought the brunt of the storm would miss the tiny town in the Green Mountains.
Many of their friends thanked them for getting them out of New York City, the projected storm target, and into Vermont. ‘And then it hit,’ Mr Leibowitz said.
The small Tweed Creek that ran in front of their bridal cottage at Riverside Farm bed-and-breakfast rose rapidly on Sunday and flooded the bridesmaids’ studio apartment below with 5ft of water.
Mr Leibowitz and his Brooklyn bride decided they needed to get to the farm’s other inn, where relatives – many of Mrs Leibowitz’s from Germany and in the U.S. for the first time – were staying.
The couple rushed to finish brunch with some of their bridesmaids, despite the owners’ warning that the road was giving way and that they should move up the mountain.
Their four-wheel drive rental car was able to make it over the bridge to the Amee Farm. ‘After we passed, the bridge collapsed,’ Mr Leibowitz said.
All of the groomsmen and one of the bridesmaids were left behind at the inn, cut off from the road.
On Monday morning, some of the groomsmen rigged up ladders to cross the stream and the remains of the bridge so they could hike in and out and from inn to inn, about a mile over the ravaged road by walking and climbing.
‘We were hiking in supplies, food and water,’ he said.
The newlyweds had planned to leave on Thursday for their Hawaiian honeymoon. But they have been told that it could be seven to 10 days before Route 100 that goes through town is repaired.
To pass the time, the couple and their wedding guests have pitched in around town, shovelling mud from homes and getting supplies to elderly residents living in the hills.
They have also been working at the Original General Store, which has become the central gathering place in town.
Mr Leibowitz said the general store’s owners have been cut off from their own home and have been staying at the store overnight.
By Tuesday, guests were picking vegetables from the farm to prepare for dinner.
Townspeople, who didn’t have electricity or phone services, were encouraged to bring perishable food to the general store, where it could be stored in a generator-powered refrigerator.
‘There’s 60 of us in a town of 400 and we’re becoming a major drain on their resources,’ Mr Leibowitz said. Another 60 guests were able to leave safely before the storm worsened.
To keep spirits up, they have been playing charades, and some of their musician friends who entertained at the wedding have been playing music at night.
‘A couple of people have been freaked out and others have been really scared,’ Mr Leibowitz said. ‘But we’re trying to keep people calm.’
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Submitted to WIDK by Emily Mooore
(Huffington Post) — So, where is Waldo? On music producer John Mosley’s back, apparently.
The tall, lanky children’s book character (and 150 of his closest friends) was tattooed on the back of the 22-year-old as part of a 24-hour tattoo challenge to raise money for London’s Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital this weekend.
Tattoo artist Rytch Soddy decided to create the intricate scene free of charge if he could raise a minimum of about $820 for the charity, according to Norwich Evening News 24.
Where’s Waldo? He’s somewhere on John Mosley’s back. The Norwich resident recently got this elaborate tattoo inspired by the popular picture books to help raise funds for children at the Great Ormond Street Hospital. Click through to see Waldo’s whereabouts. Credit: Alban Donohoe, Albanpix.com
Well, the effort paid off. The pair reportedly raised about about $3,280 to donate to the hospital.
Soddy worked on the tattoo for a full day with a two-minute break every hour, The Daily Mail reports. Soddy said it was the longest he’s ever worked on a piece.
The finished result features inch-and-a-half high people in normal dress and historic and fantasy figures like Vikings, pirates, a caveman, cowboys and Star Wars character.
As well as the distinctive Norwich skyline, it also includes a pair of UFO flying saucers and a rocket blasting into the sky besides a smiling moon wearing a red and white hat.
Mosley urged people to donate to the cause and kept fans of the challenge updated on his progress through an event page on Facebook. Nearing the tattoo’s completion, Mosley posted “Nearly done! We made it! We are built of awesome!”
The Norwich pair certainly are not the first to ink a portrait of Waldo. Comedy website College Humor featured a photo of what appears to be a woman’s Waldo tattoo behind her ear.
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