A sick practical joke ended with a Pennsylvania man laughing himself all the way back to prison. Jeffrey Barber apparently thought it would be a regular laugh riot to scare his wife by pretending he had been shot. After firing his .22-caliber rifle in the house, the 44-year-old proceeded to smear himself with tomato sauce and lay on the floor. When the missus called 911 to come to her husband's aid, the police found he was very much alive, and violating the terms of his parole by owning several guns. Barber pled guilty to illegal ownership of the firearms, and had to face the mandatory sentence of 15-years to life.

Tom is applying for a job as a signalman for the local railroad, and is told to meet the inspector at the signal box.

The inspector decides to give Tom a pop quiz, asking, "What would you do if you realized that two trains were heading towards each other on the same track?"
Tom says, "I would switch one train to another track."

"What if the lever broke?" asks the inspector.
"I'd run down to the tracks and use the manual lever," answers Tom.

"What if that had been struck by lightning?" challenges the inspector.
"Then," Tom continues, "I'd run back up here and use the phone to call the next signal box."

"What if the phone was busy?"
"In that case," Tom argues, "I'd run to the street level and use the public phone near the station."

"What if that had been vandalized?"
"Oh, well," says Tom, "in that case I'd run into town and get my Uncle Leo."

This puzzles the inspector, so he asks, "Why would you do that?"

"Because he's never seen a train crash!"

New research indicates that parts of the brain that govern fear and anxiety are switched off during female orgasm.

In the study to map brain function during female orgasm, scientists from the Netherlands also found that as a woman climaxes, an area of the brain that governs emotional control is also heavily deactivated.

“The fact that there is no deactivation in faked female orgasms means a basic part of a real orgasm is letting go. Women can imitate orgasm quite well, as we know, but there is nothing really happening in the brain,'' said neuroscientist Gert Holstege, presenting his findings at the meeting of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology.

In the study, Holstege and his colleagues at Groningen University recruited 11 men and 13 women, together with their respective partners.

The volunteers laid on a scanning machine bed and were injected with a dye that shows changes in brain function on a scan. For the men, the brain scanner tracked activity during rest, during erection, during manual stimulation by their partner and then during ejaculation, brought on by the partner's hand.

For the women, the scanner measured brain activity during rest, while they faked an orgasm, during manual stimulation by their partner, and while they experienced genuine female orgasm.

Holstege said he had trouble getting reliable results from the study on men because the scanning machine needs activities lasting at least two minutes to record an activity. But the men's climaxes didn't last anywhere near that long, meaning he could not reliably compare the scans before climax and during.

However, for female orgasms, the results were clear, he said.

When women faked orgasm, the cortex, the part of the brain governing conscious action, lit up. It was not activated during genuine orgasm, the AP reports.

The most striking results, however, were seen in the parts of the brain that shut down, or deactivated.

“During female orgasm, there was strong, enormous deactivation in the brain. During fake orgasm, there was no deactivation of the brain at all. None,'' Holstege said. “It looks like to have an orgasm, you need to not be fearful or full of anxiety.''

ROMANCE MATHEMATICS
» Smart man + smart woman = romance
» Smart man + dumb woman = affair
» Dumb man + smart woman = marriage
» Dumb man + dumb woman = pregnancy

OFFICE ARITHMETIC
» Smart boss + smart employee = profit
» Smart boss + dumb employee = production
» Dumb boss + smart employee = promotion

 A media exhibit featuring a campaign for a fake drug to treat a fictitious illness is causing a stir because some people think the illness is real.

Australian artist Justine Cooper created the marketing campaign for a non-existent drug called Havidol for Dysphoric Social Attention Consumption Deficit Anxiety Disorder (DSACDAD), which she also invented.

But the multi-media exhibit at the Daneyal Mahmood Gallery in New York, which includes a Web site, mock television and print advertisements and billboards is so convincing people think it is authentic.

"People have walked into the gallery and thought it was real," Mahmood said in an interview.

"They didn't get the fact that this was a parody or satire."

But Mahmood said it really took off over the Internet. In the first few days after the Web site (www.havidol.com) went up, it had 5,000 hits. The last time he checked it had reached a quarter of a million.

"The thing that amazes me is that it has been folded into real Web sites for panic and anxiety disorder. It's been folded into a Web site for depression. It's been folded into hundreds of art blogs," he added.

The parody is in response to the tactics used by the drug industry to sell their wares to the public. Consumer advertising for prescription medications, which are a staple of television advertising in the United States, was legalised in the country in 1997.

A 10-year-old boy stowed away on a train and ran away from home in China - because he had too much homework.

Xu Zhiqiang, 10, from Cili town, Hunan province, ended up thousands of miles away from home, reports Information Times.

He said he could not cope with the amount of homework he was expected to complete during the one month winter holiday.

Xu said: "Each of us has to finish two thick books of homework. Take the mathematics homework as an example, it has 100 pages with all kinds of questions."

To make matters worse, Xu's mom found a mistake on one question and punished him by getting him to correct the mistake and copy the right answer 100 times.

After copying it 50 times, an exhhausted Xu ran out of his home and hopped onto a train.

"I stayed under the seat a day and a night during which I transferred trains as all people did and finally I didn't know where I had come to," he said.

Xu had reached Guangzhou station, thousands of miles from home, where a station policeman found him the next day.

He could not remember his telephone number - or even his full address - but eventually the policeman managed to contact his worried parents.

The boy's father, Xu Yueping, said: "We were going desperate. The whole town was out looking for him. Now we finally can breathe normally."