Archive for October, 2010

Cobras

Author: Colin Jones

The spitting cobra is one of the most peculiar species of snake as it not only has a deadly bite but it also sprays venom into the eyes of prey and aggressors alike. Contact with the eyes can be very painful and even blinding, therefore, if you accidentally get cobra snake venom in your eyes, wash them out immediately so as to prevent permanent damage to the tissue.

The King Cobra, Ophiophagus hannah, also distinguishes itself in this large family of snakes (elapids) by the fact that it feeds almost entirely on other snakes with mice and small birds also falling prey to its venom.

The King Cobra is also unique because of its size – it can reach 5.85m (almost 20 feet) in length, which makes it the longest poisonous snake in the world. The latest discovery of a new species of cobra was made in 2003 when it was identified by London Zoo as part of an illegal shipment of exotic pets.

Going by DNA reports, this new species of snake is similar to the red spitting cobra but differs in genes. It apparently originates from an area between Sudan and Egypt and it has been named the ‘Nubian Spitting Cobra’.

Though highly dangerous when it senses a threat, a cobra will not attack if you leave it in peace, although the venomous spit can travel very accurately for two meters. If compared to the strike of a rattlesnake, the cobra is pretty slow in attack, and many bites prove blank, that is without envenomation.

A study conducted on Malaysian cobra snake victims indicates that only 55% of the wounds involved venom release and the same statistics indicate a mortality rate of 10% for people bitten, since the toxins injected into the blood of the prey devastate the nerves (neurotoxin) inducing respiratory failure half an hour after being bitten, giving you 30 minutes to seek an antidote.

The colouration is variable from light green-grey to black, while juveniles are yellow and black banded. This snake can find a habitat all over south-eastern Asia.

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Costume Design

Author: Owen Jones

People all over the world like watching films and films often reflect local traditional stories and folklore. The fascination with ghosts, ghouls and witches is a global phenomenon, but there are more local ones too.

One of the most well-known in Europe is the so-called vampire, Vlad the Impaler, who really did exist but probably not in the form of the vampire that we all know of today from books and films.

Then there are the witches and warlocks who have been both respected and feared throughout history. Think of Merlin the Magician from the court of King Arthur and the witches of Salem in the United States, who were persecuted and murdered along with thousands of others in Europe at that same time.

There are also tree nymphs or dryads, believed in by the ancient druids and many peoples in other continents as well such as Asia and Africa. Fairies and goblins are or at least were widely feared all over the planet and there were the little people in Ireland, the Leprechauns. However, these characters did not only live on land. The ancient Greeks believed in Poseidon the god of the sea and many sailors believed in mermaids.

Some would argue that angels,cherubim, seraphim and the like come into the same category. Some would even say that Satan and God do as well. All of the above characters, with the possible exception of God, have been represented by human beings at parties that we call fancy dress parties many, many times.

Many movies have been made which include some of the above characters. The most famous of these in recent years being the Harry Potter series and the Lord of the Rings. Just imagine the work that must have gone into making the costumes for those films.

What if you could design your own costume on that plane of excellence for your next fancy dress party? Well, the costume designers working on those films are professionals, obviously, and they have big budgets and ample of resources to work with. You will be much more restricted, but you can still realize very good results.

The first thing to do is select the character that you want to dress up as. Let’s say a vampire. Then you ought to do a bit of research to find out what the character looked like. This is very simple on the Internet or you may have films and books on the topic. Then you make a list of the things you will need in order to dress yourself the same and perhaps the make-up you will require too.

So, for a vampire, you will need long black trousers or a long black dress; a black jacket, shirt or blouse; black shoes and a black cape (or blanket). Some white make-up or talcum powder will give you a ghouls complexion and some red or dark-red lipstick will emphasize your deathly pale complexion. A set of long white or yellowish fangs finishes the image. Then all you need to do is practice a few hypnotic stares in the mirror and a couple of weird stares and you are ready.

If you find it hard to get hold of any piece of the fancy dress, you could either rent a costume locally or purchase one from the Internet.

Owen Jones, the writer of this piece, writes on a variety of subjects, but is now involved with costumes for kids parties. If you would like to know more, please visit our website at Costumes For Kids Parties.

In some cases, these wounds finish up interrupting the daily activities. Heavy wounds increase nervousness and disappointment.

General damages include not just the physical wounds but also the emotional shock undergone by the individual because of the impact. If the side effects of these wounds carry on for months, the compensation received would also increase appropriately. Infrequently , the people have depression.

In the case of whiplash wounds in a road accident, you can file claims on both general as well as physical damages due to the accident and claim for whiplash compensation.

The compensation principally is dependent on the circumstances in which the injury took place and the final amount actually relies on case-to-case basis. Nevertheless one should be conscious of some common factors that are typically considered to have an approximate notion of what on earth could be the final repayment.

Considering the amount of questions online pertaining to whiplash wounds and the compensation process, we will come to the decision that these wounds are rather common, but few people really have the data as to the way the compensation for these wounds are figured out.

All of these factors are taken into account while deciding on the compensation. It’s vital to keep records of all of the medical reports and prescriptions. This would also explain the duration for which you have gone through the sufferings as well as the treatment needed to conquer the same.?

The invention of the Internet has brought about many changes in the manner we conduct our lives and our own business. We can pay our bills online, go shopping online, go banking online, and even make a date online!

We can even participate in online stock trading. Online stock investors love having the ability to follow their investment accounts whenever they want to, and online stock brokers love having the ability to take orders over the Internet, as opposed to using the telephone.

The majority of stock brokers and brokerage houses now offer online stock trading to their customers. One other great thing about online stock trading is that fees and commissions are often lower. While online stock trading is good news, there are some drawbacks too.

So, if you are a novice to trading, having the ability to actually speak with a stock broker can be very beneficial, if you aren’t stock market conscious, online stock trading may be a rather risky thing for you to do, although advice from a stock market trader is expensive. If this is the situation, make sure that you learn as much as you can about trading stocks before you start online stock trading.

You ought also to remember that not everyone has a computer with Internet access on them, although many mobile phones can get online, so you might not always have the ability to get online to make a trade. You will need to be sure that you can call and consult with your broker if you use an online stock broker. This is true whether you are an experienced stock market trader or a beginner.

It is also important to go with an online stock brokerage firm that has been around for a while. You won’t find one that has been in online business for 30-50 years of course, but you can find a company that has been in business that long and that now offers online stock trading.

Sure, online stock trading is a wonderful thing – but it is not for everyone, the impetuous can lose money quickly. Think long and hard before you decide to opt for online stock trading, and make sure that you really know what you are doing!

If you want to know more about Where To Make Your Investments, just go along to our web-based resource Online Stock Investing for more information. This article, Making Money By Online Stock Trading is available for free reprint.

The Atkins Grapefruit Diet.

Author: Frank Williams

The Atkins Grapefruit diet is a diet plan, not endorsed by the eponymous Dr. Atkins company, that hopes to play on the fame of the grapefruit diet and the Atkins diet name. However, a closer look at this diet shows that it may not be all it claims for itself.

First off, it’s pretty difficult to find information on the Atkins grapefruit diet plan. Clever people know that when someone is carrying out a deception, or a con, they will often gloss over the facts. This is what the Atkins grapefruit diet seems to do in an attempt to get people to associate it with two seemingly effective diets.

Is the Atkins Grapefruit Diet part of the Atkins Diet or recommended by the estate of the late Dr. Atkins? The answer is no, not only is there no mention of the Atkins Grapefruit Diet on the Atkins web site, but there is no fruit of any kind mentioned in the list of allowed foods in the Atkins diet Induction phase either.

The induction phase allows the following foods: Fish of all kinds. All fowl such as turkey and chicken. Any shellfish. Any meat such as beef or pork. Eggs cooked in any style including fried. Cheese. Vegetables. Herbs and Spices. Fats and Oils. Low carbohydrate beverages including diet soft drinks.

Please, notice one thing – that fruit is not on that list at all! Later phases of the Atkins diet do include limited amounts of fruits such as cantaloupe and even strawberries, and the pre-maintenance and maintenance phases even allow small quantities of grapefruit, but when looked at in comparison with the amount of Grapefruit recommended on the Atkins Grapefruit Diet there is a massive discrepancy.

The Atkins Grapefruit Diet suggests a cup of grapefruit juice or a cup of grapefruit sections, with 8 and 18 carbs respectively. Even the most liberal phases of the Atkins diet suggests restricting intake to below 8 carbs per day, with regard to grapefruit. That is a direct contradiction of one plan to the other.

Most reasonable people would have a look at the Atkins website itself the moment they heard of the Atkins Grapefruit Diet and when they found no mention of that diet on their site, a red light would flash and an alarmbell would sound.

In general, remember that any plan that relies very heavily on one type of food, such as grapefruit on a grapefruit diet, is unhealthy for any but very short periods. The Atkins Grapefruit Diet is not associated with the Atkins diet, and may interfere with the results of the Atkins diet, especially in its early phases.

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Importance Of Having Stairlifts

Author: Geoff Wilson

If you want to bring back mobility and accessibility for your elderly members of the family around the house, stairlifts are here. These are helpful especially for people who happen to have particular health conditions that make climbing up and down the stairs a weary task. Also, these chairs will help them move with ease and at the same time make your home friendlier to elderly guests and visitors.

What are stairlifts?

Reasons to consider having stairlifts

Stairlifts against residential elevators, wheelchair lifts, and ramps

If you happen to own a four-story home, getting up and down the stairs is not an easy task.Try asking your elderly family members about how they feel going up and down the stairs, and for sure they are going to answer that it is a tiresome and painful experience. If you want to give back to them the freedom and accessibility around the house you should consider getting stairlifts and make life easier for them, especially for elderly family members. Your grandmother and grandfather will thank you for this because they will be able to move around the house more freely and comfortably. Even family members who happen to have injuries can use stairlifts. They are not just for the elderly, anybody who happens to have a hard time getting up and down the staircase can benefit a lot from these chairs. They help you get up and around with more ease.

Stairlifts are highly recommended for those who find going up and down the stairs a difficult challenge. As mentioned earlier, they are easier to install and more affordable compared to installing elevators. They deliver the same results and have the same benefits. One advantage that they have that most homeowners will consider a bonus is their special features like the sensor system. This device can be found attached to the chair; it prevents accidents from happening by automatically stopping the chair. It can detect blocks in the pathway and stops collisions from happening. Another feature is the special remote that you can use to adjust the speed. If you are considering owning stairlifts you have to know that technicians can have them customized for you based on your needs – whether you are left or right handed – weight, and height. You need not worry about it supporting you.

When you plan to install stairlifts, you must talk to Stannah and know the appropriate design for your house.

If you are thinking about setting up a home theater system, then there are three basic pieces of equipment to consider. They are the screen, the speakers and the player. Two of these components are directly linked to the dimensions of the room in which you will be seated and where you will be seated.

All DVD players over a certain price are pretty good and you ought to listen to a couple to make up your mind. The same with speakers, although how many you will need is dependent on the proportions of the room. The screen is more important and that is what I want to discuss here.

It will not actually be of very much help to you to just go into a department store which stocks fifty or sixty television sets all in rows. You may find that you have a preference for one screen’s colour display over another, but the colours are controllable anyway by brightness, contrast and colour mix. You ought to view the screen as it will be seen in your home theater.

In order to do this, I always advise getting a pen, paper, preferably graph paper, and a rule. Draw in the proportions of the room to the largest scale that the sheet of paper allows, maybe one inch for two feet or there abouts. Then draw a line to represent the screen against whichever wall you choose and finally add a few squares for the seating. Now measure the space between them and write that figure down, because it is very important.

Using our scale above, if the gap on paper between the screen and the seats is five inches, the distance in the room will be ten feet and ten feet is 120 inches. A good rule of thumb, when trying to work out screen size is the same one used for paintings, which is that the ideal viewing distance of a picture is between three and five times its diagonal measurement. Therefore, in our example, the ideal screen size should be between 40 and 24 inches. However, many experts put a minimum screen size for a home theater at 28 inches.

That may come as a bit of a surprise to many of you, because a lot of people think that the answer is the bigger the better. However, primed with this information, now go to the TV store and look at the TV’s again. You will find that if you get up too close to some sorts of screen the picture becomes rather poor, particularly with conventional television screens. Plasma and HDTV permit you to get a little closer without losing quality.

Another factor is your age, or at least, the quality of your eyesight. Would you rather watch the film with your glasses on or off? Off for me, so I would tend towards the higher end of our scale or maybe even go above it. My eyes are not going to get any better, but I can always put my glasses on when the time comes that I cannot see my screen properly anymore. However, I want to put that time off for a while yet, so I would go for a 48 inch screen in this example for my home theater. Plasma, if I could afford it.

Owen Jones, the writer of this article, writes on many topics, but is currently involved with Home Theater Screens. If you are interested in a Home Movie Theatre, please click through to our site.

Halo 3 Screenshots

Author: Casey Jones

When a video game series is as wildly famous as the Halo series, which includes Halo 3, of course, then the result is going to be thousands of screenshots available. This piece concentrates on some of the weird and wild Halo 3 screenshots.

Before mentioning the Halo 3 screenshots specifically, let’s have a look at the numbers that create all of this media. Over 9 million copies of Halo 3 have been sold so far. That means that if every person who purchased the game plays for only 10 hours, there are more than 90 million hours of game time from which to make screen shots. A lot can happen in 90 million hours, and with all the image-uploading websites online, loads of it has been documented.

One of the things in Halo 3 that has frequently been documented in Halo 3 screenshots is what Master Chief looks like or more specifically, what his face looks like. If you use Google to find the top 10 Halo 3 screenshots, you’ll find a screenshot of Master Chief lying dead on the ground, clearly not revealing a face inside his helmet. This explains why we never see his face, say many players, because he does not actually have one.

Another of the Halo 3 screenshots featuring in the top 10 Halo 3 screenshots is that of a Marine getting hammered on a floodgate. Someone commented that it looks a lot like Han Solo when he was frozen in Carbonite. And guess what? – they’re absolutely right.

The designers of Halo 3 wanted to make it a lot simpler for players to take Halo 3 screenshots and to post them all over the Internet. In order to achieve this, they created a ‘Saved Films’ feature in the video game. This feature allows players to slow down the action, or even to freeze it, change the camera position and even move the camera around to get exactly the screenshot they want to have. Generally speaking, the ‘Save Films’ feature records all the action that takes place in the game, so it can later be turned into videos are screenshots.

Another feature that has a little bit to do with Halo 3 screenshots in the ‘Save Films’ feature, is the viewing of previously saved films. You see, the saves are not just images or video, they’re actual game data. This means two things: 1] the file size is pretty small and 2] the entire game can be watched from different angles on the Xbox 360.

That means that a person could watch a game again and again, finding new things in new places every time they watch it. That’s a lot better than plain Halo 3 screenshots.

If you like Halo 3 and are interested in learning more about it, why not visit Halo 3 Screenshots on our website called Halo 3 Insider Secrets Unique version for reprint here: Halo 3 Screenshots.

Interior Design Jobs

Author: Michael James

Are you the kind of person who is always redecorating your room or even your house? Do you find yourself happier when you’re doing this than when you’re doing any other kind of job? Then perhaps you might want to look into a career change such as going for interior design jobs.

If you’re stuck in a rut of a job and want to go for something different, then this might be just what you’re looking for in your life. Working in interior design jobs can be an enjoyable and fruitful way for you to spend your time, and if you play your cards right, then there could be quite a lot of benefit to you.

Before you run off and quit your present job however, I’d advise you to think about it very carefully. Remember that, although the market for interior design jobs is definitely there, most interior design jobs are for the self-employed and you will have to bid for each job, so if you do decide to get on the bandwagon, you might not actually get any jobs in the beginning.

Therefore, you must first make certain that interior designing is really what you want to do. And if it is, then make sure that you have enough capital and such saved up for you to be able to live comfortably until your new career takes off

If this doesn’t sound quite so appealing to you now, you could always just keep doing your old job and continue with any interior design jobs that you might get at the same time until you feel comfortable enough to make a decision between the two. It’s probably a safe bet to assume that by that time, you would have decided whether you wanted to continue chasing interior design jobs or not.

Furthermore, you also have the choice of going to an interior design college or taking some interior design courses, on or off line, to increase your interior design interests. This is a really good way for you to put your toes in the water before you take too much risk. An additional plus with either of these options is that they can be completed easily and shouldn’t present you with any real problems.

Taking any of these courses will only enhance your natural abilities and bring to the fore any talent you have in the field of interior designing. This in turn makes it simpler for you to go in for more interior design jobs by giving you a boost up the ladder so you’re better prepared to face whatever comes your way.

The hardest part will be taking that all important first step of leaving your nice safe job to go out into the unknown world of tendering for interior design jobs. However, for the person who’s got the interior design bug, there’s no better way to satisfy their craving than by trying for interior design jobs. You’ll find your energy levels and creativity blooming like it never before.

If you are looking for more info on interior design jobs, then you ought to visit our website for more free ideas on Stylish Home Decor and more. Also published at Interior Design Jobs.

Thailand: Pattaya

Author: Owen Jones

It was seven-ish and I was sitting in a nice-enough room overlooking the front doorway to the pub above which I had just moved in. The pub was the Pig and Whistle on Soi 7 in Pattaya. Across the lane was a big hole, which they were hoping to construct a hotel in and next door to that, right opposite me, was a small bar with one woman sitting on a stool outside it. Not that there was a wall there, it was open on two sides. The Soi was lovely and quiet, I thought. I also thought that I might go and sit in that little bar and talk to that woman, if my friend was late, because I would definitely see him arrive from two metres away, the width of the Soi.

So, I went to the bar in the pub at 19:15 to await my friend who said he would meet me at 20:00. It was much busier than thirty minutes earlier but not noisy and I sat at the bar. The first thing a barmaid did was say hello, give me a menu and step back. I did not really want to eat, I only wanted a beer as I presumed we would be dining together later, but I wanted to read the menu anyway.

‘A pint of Boddington’s', I said. It arrived and the girl began laying a setting for me. I tried to explain that I was not hungry, but it was no good. Like in Spain, most people eat and drink at the same time. All the while the girl was smiling at me. Then she said: ‘You live upstairs? My name Charli. What you want to eat?’. So, I gave in and ordered something and rice.

‘You first time in Thailand? You no can eat. Too spicy’, she said with a grin. ‘Oh’, I replied, ‘but I want to try. ‘I put only 50-50 for you’, she declared and was gone.

I battled my way through that meal and it took a Boddingtons and a bottle of water. Charli had been accurate, it was too hot for first-time foreigners and she had reduced the chilis by 50%. I have always heeded a Thai’s guidance on food ever since.

I moved to by the window to see what was happening as it was dark by 19:30 and I was curious. Within thirty minutes Soi 7 had changed totally. I could see hundreds of ladies and tourists milling about. I wanted to go out and join in or at least sit in the quiet bar across the lane, but I’m embarrassed to say that I was too scared, so I sat put, rivetted to the Pig like a rabbit in a hunter’s flashlight.

My friend walked in on time and after we had been talking for an hour, he said: ‘Drink up, I have someone I want you to meet’. This was it, we were going into that mele. A waitress opened the door for us and the racket and the heat were tremendous. Particularly the din. Every metre at least two or three girls would shout: ‘Hello, sexy man, you want a drink’. Trying to say no courteously to each invitation was out of the question, so I just stuck close to my pal.

Luckily, we only had about fifty metres to stroll and we sat down in another bar. My friend said hello to several ladies and then said, this a girl I have been going out with for some time. I was astounded as I had never heard him talk about her, ever. She was gorgeous, but could not speak English, so I sat in the din in silence. Not for long through, as my friend said, I have a blind date for you and he introduced another girl to me who was equally beautiful, but with whom I could speak a little. She was captivating and I was captivated. The pandemonium seemed to pass away, but it was only because I was concentrating on my new friend. The four of us had the best time and the best food I had ever had in my forty-nine years of existence.

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