Hundreds of chickens have been found dead in east China - and a court has ruled that the cause of death was the screaming of a four-year-old boy who in turn had been scared by a barking dog, state media reported.

The bizarre sequence events began when the boy arrived at a village home in the eastern province of Jiangsu in the summer with his father who was delivering bottles of gas, the Nanjing Morning Post reported.

A villager was quoted as saying the little boy bent over the henhouse window, screaming for a long time, after being scared by the dog.

“One neighbour told police that he had heard the boy’s crying that afternoon and another villager confirmed the boy screaming by the henhouse window,” the newspaper said.

A court ruled the boy’s screaming was “the only unexpected abnormal sound” and that 443 chickens trampled each other to death in fear.

The boy’s father was ordered to pay 1800 yuan ($NZ332) in compensation to the owner of the chickens.

Reuters

Every so often we dream, not always comprehensive, not always fun. In fact dreams are considered bad for a good nights rest, as they do not allow you to fall into a deep sleep. Your brain is active and metabolism rate can increase, so the body does not fully recharge as fast and efficiently as a dream-less sleep.

Here’s my story; I cannot clearly remember the beginning (as you do), but mid-way through the dream I was in a great scooter race to a finishing line located on the lake side. I was coming first, until near the end my friend overtook me. I for some reason thought the finish line was due west instead of due east and therefore went in the wrong direction. When I realised that I was heading in the wrong direction, I followed the main pack. Unfortunately, because of this mental mistake, I finished 3rd. A man, Phil Cogan (from The Amazing Race) was at the end to read out your placing. After everyone arrived, we all sat down around this man as he handed out the prizes. The guy came first won an awesome laptop. I jealously nudged him and said: “Hey, it’s a Core 2 Duo, like you always wanted!”. Then this Phil Cogan guy felt sorry for the second place guy and gave him too a laptop. I was, I WAS quite SO mad. We then went to the first-place-guy’s house to power up the laptop. It was running Mac OS X, I think. Then I woke up about 1 hour later.

To avoid dreams, we can:

• Avoid mental thinking before sleeping
• Maintain regular sleeping times
• Create a sleep-conducive environment that is dark, quiet, comfortable and cool
• Sleep on a comfortable mattress and pillows. Make sure your mattress is comfortable and supportive
• Exercise regularly
• Avoid caffeine, nicotine and alcohol

And lastly, this is one of the best ice-creams in the world. It’s called ‘Cookies and Cream’, manufactured by Tip Top. I’m going to get myself a helping soon, as it’s dessert time anyway.

I’m always thinking of something to post here. Sometimes I have really good ideas, but fail to record them in my mental memory and when I get home to post it, I immediately forget. So this is an impromptu post. Speaking of memory, my cousin gave me a DVD disk with lots of media on it. A particular album he told me to listen to is called Quantum Memory Power by Dominic O’Brien. It is an audio series which trains you to use different techniques to memorise many things. One thing I’m working towards is memorising a 40 digit number in a short amount of time. Other stuff he teaches you includes how to remember people’s names and faces, mrmorising decks of cards and critical appointments. I think I need to also get a time management audio program as I don’t have the time to listen to it that often.

Yester-yesterday would have been the 3rd year since we got our bird. I was in a sombre mood as I remembered the bird he was. He died while my father, sister and I went overseas. It would seem that he missed my father, refused to eat then starved himself. What was surprising, was that we recently contact the people we bought him from, and also discovered the same ‘illness’ had also overcome one of the birds close to them. We are currently in search of a new baby bird and will be hopefully picking it up next week.

In life, you are always told to ‘live your life as if there is no tomorrow’ and we never seem to adopt that message until it’s too late. Death for me is such a hard thing to understand - how can something or someone so great just loose their power, knowledge or skill? Is there a pool of power, knowledge or skill for the whole universe? Just yesterday we got a call an elderly church member has died. Life is so frail. After every close death I hear of, I have determination to become better, and more efficiant in or at life, as life is constructed from a medium, I for one, cannot comprehend of.

This is a decal I found on a Toyota 7-seater car. Most of the Japanese imports have ‘funny english’ mottos on the sides of the car, this one is particularly peculiar. A larger car, which was also manufactured by the same company, Toyota, was also spotted with a different motto, however this was on a separate occasion and I fail to recall the ridiculousness of it anyway.

I love to have fun, I love my family and friends. I love this beautiful planet Earth. The reason why I choose this car is because it will totally satisfy my requirements for outdoor living. Well - tomorrow, where shall we go?

Merry Christmas children. I hope you get some nice presents. Take care in unwrapping your presents, so you can re-use the wrapping paper next year. Don’t throw away unwanted gifts! Reserve them, re-wrap them, and re-distribute them to people who you want to give something to, but at no cost. Oh and remember those Boxing day sales - so many good bargains! Stock up your presents for next year. Oh look, it’s a new layout for bthreen! Oh how brilliant. Thank you Santa, thank you Jesus. For Jesus is the reason for the season.

Oh and if you get cold for Christmas, don’t use it in a fire as it will add to the carbon emissions in the air, the greenhouse effect *wooo*. That reminds me - it’s awefully cold here. *Goodnight, it’s Christmas now. Nearly… 2 more minutes.*

A few edits here and there, and there you have it a new site for me to look at. Also took away the tutorials part of the site as I saw taht not many people go there, and I don’t have time to write tutorials anyway. Despite this, I might make a downloads page where I can add my scripts I made for all to download.

Woo hoo, New Zealand’s Broadband capabilities and prices are ranked 30th out of the 34 OECD countries. Pritty shabby? But wait, there’s more - Telecom states that it will offer faster broadband speeds and lower prices. A maximum speeds of 3.5mbps - an increase of only one point five from the current maximum 2.0mbps. Compare that to Austraila which has a maximum speed of 24mbps.

Telecom’s new plans also include download speeds of up to 3.5 megabits per second (mbps) and three new services that offer an increased upload speed of 512 kilobits per second (kbps).

Customers and founders of competing ISP’s don’t find it funny, stating that they’re being feed bread crumbs. Personally, I also think its a very big ‘off-rip’ - prices are sky high compared to the Kangaroo’s across the ditch.

The founder of the internet provider Slingshot has called Telecom’s latest broadband speed offer a joke.

The government has also pitched in to drive the prices down. Helen Clark (PM of New Zealand) speaks in parliament tomorrow (Tuesday). Lets hope she says the right things. New plans and speeds are effective from April 2006. New pricings for Telecom here. Source: TVNZ