Here are some news stories from this week that I think the mainstream media completely missed out on. All links are from legitimate news sources and not the fringe / wacko sites.

* Four words: refrigerator-sized nuclear reactors. Hell yes! And at $50 million for a 25-megawatt reactor (as opposed to the usual $2.3 billion for a back-to-the-future sized 1.2 gigawatt reactor), it’s a steal! Oh, and “A 25-megawatt plant would put electricity into 20,000 homes” according to James Kohlhaas, vice president at Lockheed Martin Corp. Or, shall we say, 15,500 homes and one super secret high tech personal laboratory! All I need now is a winning lottery ticket! [BUSINESSWEEK]

* Driving gives you skin cancer? Specifically the part of your skin that hangs out the window? Damn you sun! I say we go full Republican on it’s ass and just blow the damn thing up! [WEBMD]

* Wait…the gulf oil spill is actually worse than the worsest worst worst predictions before? ONE new pulme is “10 miles long, 3 miles wide and 300 feet thick.” ONE? This is re-friggin-diculous. BP mega-nukes the Gulf of Mexico and nobody is calling for their heads? [MSNBC] Oh, and if you want some really scary analysis, click this out… “It’s not a leak, it’s a volcano spewing oil.” [EXAMINER] and [NYTIMES] Crap. Crappity crap crap crap.

* Read this next bit in that voice of that guy that does all the movie-previews… “Dispatched to Houston on a top secret mission by the President, five “extraordinarily intelligent” scientists from around the country will have to stop the biggest oceanic disaster in history…Members of the team designed the hydrogen bomb, invented techniques for mining on Mars, and found a way to precisely position biomedical needles.” Pan the camera back to reveal the actors walking toward the camera in slo-mo. Dramatic music flares! Yeah, baby! I got your movie right here! [BLOOMBERG]

* Our brains re-shoot every scene in a memory when we recall something? Dude! Our brains are George Lucas – reshooting the classics all the time?! AAAAAAA!! [SMITHSONIAN MAG]

* So if you loan someone money to keep them from starving, and they come back and SUE YOU for loaning them money, what would you think of them? Check it out – Greece would be the one with no money and the US would be the loaner. [YAHOO]

* Want a real-time tally of the promises Obama kept and the promises Obama broke? Look no further! Prepare for some surprises, too. [POLITIFACT]

* A giant friggin’ botnet is just sleeping out there in the internet. It’s huge, and has the potential to cause some serious game-changing damage whenever it wakes up. Kind of like Godzilla taking a nap. And when she wakes up? (Yes, Godzilla was a she!) Run!! Because some mega-level destruction is soon to follow! The Atlantic article has a great explanation of what a botnet is and how they work, too. [THE ATLANTIC]

* A girl re-grew kidneys after her old ones failed? Awesome!! Science needs to figure out how she did this immediately! [DAILYMAIL]

* How are things going in Afghanistan? Let’s just say if things were catastrophically FUBAR with a touch of rabies, it would be a improvement. [SLATE]

That’s it for this week. Back Monday!

How’s this for absolutely nucking futs (typo intended)… a vending machine that dispenses pure gold.

Have you ever had a week of Mondays? I finally got a moment to post somethin’!

Here are some news stories from this week that I think the mainstream media completely missed out on. All links are from legitimate news sources and not the fringe / wacko sites.

* Instead of saying how bad things are going in California, I think it’s better to show of this next clip of an early classic Arnold Schwarzenegger movie called “Conan the Barbarian” as a allegory. Imagine Schwarzenegger as the modern day governor and everyone on horseback as a line item on the California budget. There’s gonna’ be cuts. Lots and lots and lots of vicious, deep, nasty DAAAAAAYUM kinds of cuts coming. Grab the popcorn! [BLOOMBERG] and [BUSINESS INSIDER]

* The oil rig owner of the massive BP gulf oil spill would like to only pay $27 million for destroying the Gulf of Mexico. No more. Because paying more would not be fair! There’s still the Pacific Ocean, the Atlantic Ocean (there’s still a lot of clean areas!), the Indian Ocean, the Arctic ocean and the Southern Ocean to screw up! [WALL STREET JOURNAL]

* You know when you’re winning stupid amounts of money in Vegas because you’re always getting a 10 and an Ace on every hand of blackjack? No? Yeah, me either. Well, something similar happened to the “getting a 10 and an Ace” on every hand in the financial market recently. Four big banks scored a absolutely perfect 61 day run. If this happened in Vegas, I would expect a nice pair of concrete shoes to go with my new lead-based body ventilation. [NY TIMES]

* This week, “Bill Gates, the Microsoft billionaire, is funding research into machines to suck up ten tonnes of seawater every second and spray it upwards. This would seed vast banks of white clouds to reflect the Sun’s rays away from Earth.” OK, first off, flinging the happy little critters of the ocean into the stratosphere might be somewhat bad. And ten tons of seawater a second? In addition to needing a filter made of diamonds twelve inches thick, they’re going to need a massive no-fly zone around that contraption. Meh. He’s got the money to do it all. Go Bill! Go Bill! It’s yo’ birf-day! It’s yo’ birf-day! [TIMESONLINE.CO.UK]

* On the flipside of “I can’t comprehend this level of money” news stories, “the Treasury Department said Wednesday the April deficit soared to $82.7 billion. That was significantly higher than last year’s April deficit of $20 billion and the largest imbalance for that month on record.” [NY TIMES]

That’s all I got for this week! Have a great weekend ya’ll!

This is what’s happening in the gulf right now…

According to the video info, this shows… “Oil and gas stream from the riser of the Deepwater Horizon well May 11, 2010. This video is from the larger of two existing leaks on the riser. This leak is located approximately 460 feet from the top of the blowout preventer and rests on the sea floor at a depth of about 5,000 feet. (Courtesy video)”

Want to see something absolutely stunning and horrifying?

This blog shows the size of the BP gulf oil spill in real-time. You can choose any city to center the oil spill to frame the size and give some perspective on how colossal it is.

This is the oil spill superimposed on top of Newark, NJ as the “center” as of today (05/11/10).

Oil Spill as of 051110

This is beyond “bad”.