UNCONVENTIONAL WORLD RECORDS

Richard Milhous Nixon (1913 – 1994) was the 37th President of the United States (1969 – 1974). He was previously the 36th Vice President of the United States (1953 – 1961).

The Watergate scandal cost him his political support, and with looming impeachment, he resigned on 9th August 1974. He was the only US president ever to resign and has been described as “America’s most corrupt President.”

Yet, he was pardoned by his successor Gerald Ford.

Veteran White House reporter Don Fulsom will release a book entitled “Nixon’s Darkest Secrets: The Inside Story of America’s Most Troubled President” on 31st January 2012, and will reveal that Nixon was “even more sinister and haunted than we knew.”

Fulsom was a former United Press International Washington bureau chief, and has covered presidents Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Clinton. He is an adjunct professor at American University in Washington D.C., where he teaches “Watergate: A Constitutional Crisis.”

Fulsom based his book on his work covering Nixon and interviews with members of Congress, White House staff and others close to the ex-president, plus recently declassified papers and recordings.

The revelations include Nixon’s more than 20-year link to the mafia by the time he assumed the presidency in 1969, and his close association with godfather Carlos Marcello, the most powerful gangster in America.

However, the most sensational claim is of Nixon’s “intimate and possibly homosexual” relationship with confidante Charles “Bebe” Rebozo, a banker with mafia ties, someone who was “even more crooked than Nixon.”

At this juncture, we could probably take note that sensationalism sells; perhaps one could even sensationalise the president wearing stainless steel rings if one wanted to.

While there’s no smoking gun proof of these two’s dalliances, Fulsom offers “plenty of supporting evidence,” like quoting an ex-Time magazine reporter who, while at a Washington dinner, accidentally dropped his fork and while bending down to pick it up, saw Nixon and Rebozo holding hands under the table in a manner that was “sufficiently intimate to suggest repressed homosexuality.” Then there was another reporter who mentioned that, relaxed after a drink, Nixon was observed putting his arm around Rebozo in a way “you’d cuddle your senior prom date.”

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The following all happened on Christmas Day 2011

Grapevine, Texas: on a quiet Christmas morning, 6 close relatives, 4 females and 2 males, had gathered in an apartment, and had just finished unwrapping their Christmas presents, when Iranian-American real estate agent Aziz “Bob” Yazdanpanah, 56, dressed as Santa Claus, unexpectedly arrived, took out his gun, shot everybody dead, then turned the gun on himself. Police found 2 handguns.

The dead were identified as:

- Nasrin Rahmaty, 55; the ex-wife of Aziz;
- Nona Yazdanpanah, 19; the daughter of Aziz;
- Ali Yazdanpanah, 15; the son of Aziz;
- Zohreh Rahmaty, 58; Nasrin’s sister;
- Hossein Zarei, 59; Zohreh’s husband;
- Sahra Zarei, 22; Zohreh and Hossein’s only daughter.

He had separated from his wife in March. They married in 1987.

While the family was Muslim, they celebrated Christmas as a cultural holiday.

Madalla, Nigeria: it was in the middle of mass on the morning of Christmas day at St Theresa Catholic Church when a bomb planted by terrorists exploded, killing 27 people and severely damaged surrounding buildings and cars. The country’s top newspaper described it as “Nigeria’s blackest Christmas ever.” In all 3 churches were bombed on Christmas Day, the second consecutive Christmas attacks in a row that the Boko Haram Islamist sect has claimed responsibility for.

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Skylab was a NASA space station and orbited the Earth from 1973 to 1979. In 1979, it reentered Earth’s atmosphere and was destroyed.

Skylab 4 (also known asSL-4 and SLM-3), the 4th Skylab mission placed the 3rd and last crew onboard the space station. The mission started on 16th November 1973 and lasted 84 days.

The crewmembers were Commander Gerald P. Carr, Pilot William R. Pogue and Science Pilot Edward G. Gibson.

Therefore, after Apollo 8 in 1968, they were the second group of a humans to spend Christmas in space.

The crew made a Christmas tree using food cans, and perhaps stabilised by improvising with other things too like threaded inserts.

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Commander Frank Borman, Command Module Pilot Jim Lovell and Lunar Module Pilot William Anders were the first humans to spend Christmas in space.

They were the crewmembers aboard Apollo 8 which launched on 21st December 1968 and entered the moon’s orbit on Christmas Eve.

To mark the special occasion, they sent greetings and photos, and read from the Book of Genesis.

Commander Borman ended the message with the words:

Good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you — all of you on the good Earth.

About a billion people watched or listened to the broadcast.

They safely returned to Earth on 27th December.

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The Daily Mail (UK) reported on the 30th November 2011 that the worst Christmas tree in Britain was planted in the middle of the hamlet of Dunsdale, Cleveland, in the north-east.

It had been in a sorry state in its pot since a year ago but was somehow still planted by the local council as a way to bring up the Christmas mood, complete with lights that were incongruously bigger than the tree’s branches.

The top 2 feet of the tree is still alive, and the rest already dead

However, villagers complained about the “pathetically limp” tree in the local newspaper, and Council officers reportedly were so embarrassed by it that they removed the tree in the dead of night a mere few hours after getting wind of the news.

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A Swedish TV presenter and artist, Ylva-Maria Thompson, 51 has opened the world’s first “college of applied sexuality”, named the Austrian International School of Sex (AISOS), located in Vienna, scheduled to start operations in autumn 2012.

Purpose: to teach how to be better lovers.

Fee: GBP1,400 per term (that’s about RM7,000).

Minimum age of admission: 16.

Modules: sexual positions, caressing techniques, anatomical features.

One could say this is one course where nobody would skip class.

Students live in a mixed gender dorm building where they’re expected to “practise their homework.”

And as with any course, there’ll be a certificate awarded in a convocation.

Its advert have already been banned by Austrian TV:

Website: aisos.at

Facebook page

Selected reactions:

New Austrian chat up line… “Do you want to see my certificate?”

Is there a discount for pensioners?

How are they examined at the end – doing it with the course leader??

It would be nice to fail, and go on and do the course again.

I bet the classes are full of old men.

I bet the most attractive girl always gets asked to help the boy’s with their homework.

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… or rock stars parents wouldn’t mind to be role models for their kids. In fact, after reading this, they might even encourage their kids to pick up that vocopro and belt their hearts out to an Iron Maiden screamer.

Bruce Dickinson (born 1958) is best known as the lead vocalist of the heavy metal band Iron Maiden. Joining the band in 1981 to replace Paul Di’Anno, he gained worldwide fame, becoming one of the most acclaimed heavy metal vocalists in history. He is also an airline pilot, fencer, broadcaster, author, screenwriter, actor and marketing director. His interests also include railway technology.

As a fencer, he has competed internationally, and have ranked as high as seventh in Great Britain. He also founded a fencing equipment company under the brand name Duellist.

As an airline pilot, he holds an airline transport pilot’s licence. He regularly flew Boeing 757s in his role as captain for the UK airline Astraeus.

Due to the wide variety of his pursuits, the Winter 2009 edition of Intelligent Life has named him as a living example of a polymath.

Brian May (born 1947) is best known as the lead guitarist and a songwriter of the rock band Queen. The classic “We Will Rock You” was composed by him. He was ranked number 39 on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time.

Top guitarist Steve Vai has been quoted as saying:

Brian May is a class act from head to toe, and it shows in his playing. I can listen to any player and pantomime their sound, but I can’t do Brian May. He’s just walking on higher ground.

He studied physics and maths at Imperial College London, graduating with an upper second class BSc (Hons) degree. He then proceeded to study for a PhD degree (on reflected light from interplanetary dust and the velocity of dust in the plane of the Solar System) at the same place, and was part of the way through, but then abandoned his doctorate when Queen became successful. In October 2007, more than 30 years after he started his research, he finally completed his PhD thesis in astrophysics entitled A Survey of Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud, and officially graduated on 14th May 2008.

On 17th November 2007, he was appointed Chancellor of Liverpool John Moores University, taking over from Cherie Blair.

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It was reported earlier this year that associate professor Marc L. Moskowitz, of the Department of Anthropology of the University of South Carolina and “an expert on Taiwan’s folk religion and popular culture” has released a documentary entitled Dancing for the Dead: Funeral Strippers in Taiwan based on many hours of fieldwork he conducted throughout Taiwan in 2008.

A folk tradition in rural Taiwan is to hire young women to strip at a funeral ceremonies, and is deemed an important part of the grieving process, as a way to send off the recently dead. Some said it was because new ghosts (i.e. the spirit of the recently deceased) get picked on by older ghosts, thus the show was done to distract the older ghosts in order to let the new ghost get used to his new surroundings in peace.

Apparently, the custom came to the fore in the early 1980s and is basically associated with the working class.

The scantily clad girls hop on an Electric Flower Car [EFC] (which are actually diesel trucks with a stage attached and multicoloured lighting installed), then sing while erotically gyrating to pop numbers, finally stripping down to full nudity.

Surely scenes like this is few and far between elsewhere around the world

The government isn’t condoning it – it’s actively trying to crack down on the practice.

Video:

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