Wasted Daily News

An eccentric 78-year-old inventor who was thwarted in his fourth attempt to become governor of Tokyo was undaunted, saying he plans to run 16 more times and will win by outliving his opponents, local media said on Monday.

“I’m going to live to 144, so I’m still only middle-aged. I can run for Tokyo governor 16 more times,” the Sports Hochi newspaper quoted Yoshiro Nakamatsu as saying.

“In that time, all the others will die off, so I will be elected,” added Nakamatsu, the self-proclaimed inventor of the floppy disk and the oldest candidate in the race. Nakamatsu came fifth in Sunday’s election, which gave 74-year-old Shintaro Ishihara his third term as Tokyo governor.

Ishihara won 2.8 million votes, according to national broadcaster NHK’s Web site, while Nakamatsu got 85,946, or 1.6 percent of the total. Read the rest of this entry →

The city may be looking for a few good noses. When it meets Tuesday, the City Council is expected to set a public hearing for a law that would create a committee to sniff out objectionable odors.

Ogden’s chief administrator, John Patterson, said the city is not singling out a specific company for enforcement. But there have been complaints about a pet-food factory, American Nutrition Inc. Read the rest of this entry →

Astronaut Lisa Nowak carried copies of steamy e-mails that her NASA lover had written to his new girlfriend the night she raced cross-country in a diaper to confront her rival, according to documents released on Tuesday.

Florida prosecutors released copies of the e-mails, police statements and other evidence in the case against Nowak, 43.

Nowak has pleaded not guilty to charges of attempted kidnapping, burglary and battery after confronting her rival at the Orlando International Airport last month. Read the rest of this entry →

At a laboratory in Germany, volunteers slide into a donut-shaped MRI machine and perform simple tasks, such as deciding whether to add or subtract two numbers, or choosing which of two buttons to press.

They have no inkling that scientists in the next room are trying to read their minds — using a brain scan to figure out their intention before it is turned into action.

In the past, scientists had been able to detect decisions about making physical movements before those movements appeared. But researchers at Berlin’s Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience claim they have now, for the first time, identified people’s decisions about how they would later do a high-level mental activity — in this case, adding versus subtracting. Read the rest of this entry →

Organizers lit up a 8.1-mile string of explosives in a southern Taiwanese county Sunday, hoping to create the world’s longest firecracker in a record-setting attempt expected to last two hours.

TV footage of the Chinese New Year celebration in Tainan County, dubbed “Legend of the Fire Dragon,” showed rapid flashes of bright red explosions that created huge wafts of white smoke. Read the rest of this entry →

Two packages containing human body parts — including a liver and part of a head — meant for a medical research lab instead were delivered to a home.

The body parts, sent from China, were mistakenly dropped off Thursday at Franck and Ludivine Larmande’s home by a DHL express driver who believed the bubble-wrapped items were pieces to a table. Read the rest of this entry →

Think Wall Street has seen the worst of the sell-off? Not if the stars are right.

That is the latest prognostication from financial astrologer Arch Crawford, who predicts the direction of financial markets using a mix of technical and fundamental analysis paired with close examination of planetary cycles.

His current assessment: A lunar eclipse and an opposition of Saturn and Neptune are in the cosmic cards this week. Combined with some bearish market fundamentals, that should keep the world’s biggest stock market under a cloud, the stargazer wrote to clients. Read the rest of this entry →