Christmas Peace & Dreams

Marloes Horst & Viktoria Halenarova | Manor Christmas 2011 Lingerie Collection SN Living

It’s positively unAmerican to suggest that consumption-crazy Americans stay home on Black Friday, enjoying a glass of wine with family and friends. The Friday after Thanksgiving brings out the cannibal in many shoppers.

At the top of today’s growing list of Black Friday horror stories is the pepper spray sprayed on a crowd of shoppers at a Los Angeles-area Walmart in Porter Ranch, leaving reports of 15-20 other shoppers suffering minor injuries in the competitive rush to buy discounted Xboxes and Wiis. Eye witness Alejandra Seminario told the LA Times:

Wal-Mart employees were taking statements near the front of the store from about eight customers who had been pepper-sprayed, Seminario said. “After we paid, we saw five that were in really bad shape,” she said. “They had been sprayed in the face, it looked like, and they had swelling of the face, really extreme swelling of face, redness, coughing.”

Conversely, North Carolina police used Pepper spray to break up a Walmart mob in North Carolina. The Daily Beast also cites gunfire as part of the Black Friday story.

World’s Hottest Chili Pepper A Non-Lethal Weapon

In a spectacular piece of ingenuity, the Indian military is using bhut jolokia, the world’s hottest chili, to make tear gas-like hand grenades to immobilize suspects.

The chili also known as ghost chili has more than 1,000,000 Scoville units, the scientific measurement of a chilli’s spiciness. Classic Tabasco sauce ranges from 2,500 to 5,000 Scoville units, while jalapeno peppers measure anywhere from 2,500 to 8,000. Read on at AOC News Musings

DFR (Daily French Roast)

A slimmed-down Nigella Lawson steps out in LondonNigella Lawson Drops Christmas Pudding

Today’s Daily Mail says that a dramatically smaller Nigella Lawson has turned herself over to the Bodyism Clean and Lean plan, a program developed by James Duigan, personal trainer and nutritional advisor to models Elle Macpherson and Rosie Huntington-whiteley and actor Hugh Grant. It’s looks like the guaranteed to work high protein, low carb diet to us.

Stars say the plan is based on intelligence and science. A quick look at the high-vitamin B diet seems to confirm that analysis.

Websites Be Damned!

Many website owners and webmasters are reading The Pummeling Pages, a damnation by Brent Simmons of the current state of so much web content and typical websites.

The site has good writing. But the pages do everything possible to convince people not to try. “Don’t bother,” the pages say. “It’s hopeless. Oh — and good luck not having a seizure!”

They’re filled with ads and social-media sharing buttons — and more ads. And Google plus-onesies and Facebook likeys. And also more ads. Plus tweet-this-es. Plus ads. (And, under-the-hood, a whole cruise-ship-full of analytics. The page required well-more than 100 http calls.)

While we, too, struggle to be creative in developing a revenue strategy, the fight against this invasion of our brains has always been front and center in Anne’s relationship with the ‘advisers’ who have told her she’s crazy and lacking strategy in her web vision. Read on: AOC Readers Get Respect, Great Content, No Attack Ads.

More Daily French Roast

WSJ visita Ruth Bancroft, 103, the creator of one of California’s most important gardens — ‘dry’, exotic and needing very little water.

The Sex Addiction Epidemic Newsweek