Blackthorn ~ 1735 Route 46 East, Parsippany NJ

NOW OPEN !

www.Blackthornpub.com

Serving Lunch & Dinner

Happy Hour Mon - Fri 4-7pm

Phone - 973-334-4900

Fax - 973-334-4902

1735 Route 46 East

FRIDAY NIGHT IS LADIES NIGHT

$ 4 Mixed Drinks for the Girls ...

RED BULL HIGH

HONG KONG (AFP) – Hong Kong officials say they have found traces of cocaine in cans of Red Bull, a few days after Taiwanese authorities confiscated close to 18,000 cases of the popular energy drink.
Officials at the Centre for Food Safety said a laboratory analysis found tiny amounts of the illegal drug in samples of "Red Bull Cola," "Red Bull Sugar-free" and "Red Bull Energy Drink", a spokesman said.
The drink has now been taken off the shelves of major supermarkets, the spokesman said in a statement issued late Monday. He added that the amount of cocaine found in the drinks posed little health danger.
Red Bull moved quickly to deny the findings and said independent tests on the same batch of drinks had found no traces of cocaine.
The Centre for Food Safety found traces of cocaine between 0.1 and 0.3 micrograms of the illegal drug per litre, the statement said.
Hong Kong's commissioner for narcotics, Sally Wong, said the government was now taking legal advice on any possible liability for importers and retailers.
"Cocaine is a dangerous drug... The possession and dealing in the drug is a criminal offence," she said in the statement.
Red Bull's Asia Pacific marketing director, Daniel Beatty, said the firm strongly disputed the findings.
"It would have been absolutely impossible for the Hong Kong or any other authorities to have found traces of cocaine in Red Bull Energy Drink," he said in a statement.
"We expect the Hong Kong authorities to recognize their error soon," he said, adding the firm's representatives were already meeting with Taiwanese authorities to point out the error.
Taiwan officials said Saturday they had confiscated nearly 18,000 cases of Red Bull imported from Austria after finding it contained traces of the drug.
Taiwanese authorities ordered the drinks to be removed from shelves pending further investigation.
Red Bull, whose advertising slogan is "Red Bull gives you wings," was founded by Austrian toothpaste salesman Dietrich Mateschitz in the 1980s.
It has since become one of the dominant players in the global energy drinks market.

Taco Bell X USA

In an effort to help the national debt, Taco Bell is pleased to announce that we have agreed to purchase the Liberty Bell, one of our country's most historic treasures. It will now be called the 'Taco Liberty Bell' and will still be accessible to the American public for viewing. While some may find this controversial, we hope our move will prompt other corporations to take similar action to do their part to reduce the country's debt."

X WishUponAHero.com X

Granting Wishes to Strangers
WishUponAHero.com Connects Thousands in Need With Those Willing to Give

Dave Girgenti is a marketing manager from New Jersey, and many would say that he sees the world through rose-colored glasses. "I think anyone would help anyone if they knew who to help and how to help them," he said.
Girgenti has found thousands of people whose generosity continues to prove him right.
A year-and-a-half ago, Girgenti launched WishUponAHero.com, what he calls a social "helping" site where anyone can post wishes, which in turn are answered by "heroes," who offer to help make those wishes come true.
"If you want to become a hero it's as easy as clicking on someone's wish that you are emotionally connected with," Girgenti said. "You never know what your super power is, meaning you never know what you can grant because it's as simple as advice or a birthday card. Anyone can be a hero."
Wish Upon a Hero was born out of Girgenti's desire to help people after tragedies like September 11th and Hurricane Katrina.
"The one thing that struck me with Sept. 11 was people hanging photos all over the city looking for lost loved ones, and I figured if there was an online site that people could post up that information, people could find people much faster," he said.
The site has grown from helping to reunite families to granting wishes big and small  so far, more than 27,000 requests have been granted.
"The wishes range from very small things like cards &We had weddings granted. We sent wheelchairs. We get children eye glasses," Girgenti said.
Heroes have sent a World War II veteran back to Pearl Harbor for his 90th birthday. Several people chipped in to get a bike for a boy with Down syndrome. For a girl whose house burned down, heroes gave her a dress and shoes for her senior prom. A boy with terminal cancer got a chance to meet his basketball idols.
Ginny Winderman, who volunteers to help run the site, has been a hero 412 times.
"I could reach out to the people I wanted to reach out to. It wasn't like I was giving to one particular organization where I really didn't know where it was going to," Winderman said. "It was an individual -- someone who really needed something."
'No Wish Too Large, No Hero Too Small'
Many people on the site both ask for and grant wishes, playing the roles of giver and receiver through good times and bad -- call it "bartering karma." Nancy Mitchell has granted 21 wishes.
"You just start reading some of these wishes and your gut tells you, 'I've got to do something because that is the right thing to do,'" said Mitchell. "There are so many stories and you can see how people have it worse than you. No matter how bad you have it, there are people who have it worse than you."
After her husband lost one of his jobs, Mitchell reluctantly posted a wish. Their dryer had stopped working, their car needed $3,000 in repairs and then their refrigerator died.
"Honestly I don't know why I waited so long because I know how powerful the site can be. I've witnessed it. I've participated in it," she said. "Then there comes a pickup truck with a brand new refrigerator. I didn't know what to say. I was speechless."
Mitchell's hero was Ginny Winderman.
"I can't thank her enough. She gave me my holidays back. She have me traditions back with my family. It's not just an appliance," Mitchell said.
"I think she hugs it every day," Winderman said of the new refrigerator.
Both women are examples of how far simple acts of kindness can go -- especially in rough economic times.
"You can make a difference and it doesn't cost you a penny," Mitchell said. "It may be just a phone call. It may be just a kind word. But something as simple as that can make all the difference in the world to somebody in need."
To become a hero, you can visit their website,

www.WishUponAHero.com.

http://www.abcnews.go.com/WN/PersonOfWeek/story?id=7077296&page=1

Blackberry X Big Brother

Kind of creepy news trickling out of Research in Motion, the company that makes the phenomenally successful Blackberry. In an interview with ZDNet, the company's CIO, Robin Bienfait, said that RIM records, well, pretty much everything you do within its walls, including your personal phone calls.
Specifically, "all actions carried out on RIM's internal network" are logged, which means emails, web browsing, and phone calls, all recorded for posterity. "I record everything," said Bienfait, putting it bluntly.
Many office workers are accustomed to IT oversight of their computer habits -- email is backed up for legal and data security purposes (though it's rarely ever read) and many companies restrict employees from visiting certain websites -- not just gambling/gaming/porn but also career and sometimes even "gossip" sites. But recording every phone call? Even for die-hard "employer rights" advocates, that's a tough one to swallow.
Naturally Bienfait is concerned about leaks, as the company, like most of the current-era tech world, jealously guards the details about its upcoming product line. Should word get out about what RIM is working on, untold amounts of damage could be rained down on the company. Why, just imagine how many people would be knocking off the BlackBerry Storm and its mega-button design had they gotten wind of it in advance...
For the most part, employees seem to accept the Big Brother treatment, but things get dicey when employees have to deal with personal issues on work time -- say, a divorce proceeding or medical conversations -- things which they'd probably rather not have recorded permanently by Bienfait's crew. Her advice: Bring in a cell phone and take the call there instead.
Just don't do it on your corporate BlackBerry. Those are of course monitored too.

GUNS X ROSES

Let's get right to it: The first Guns n' Roses album of new, original songs since the first Bush administration is a great, audacious, unhinged and uncompromising hard-rock record. In other words, it sounds a lot like the Guns n' Roses you know. At times, it's the clenched-fist five that made 1987's perfect storm, Appetite for Destruction; more often, it's the one sprawled across the maxed-out CDs of 1991's Use Your Illusion I and II, but here compressed into a convulsive single disc of supershred guitars, orchestral fanfares, hip-hop electronics, metallic tabernacle choirs and Axl Rose's still-virile, rusted-siren singing.
If Rose ever had a moment's doubt or repentance over what Chinese Democracy has cost him in time (13 years), money (14 studios are listed in the credits) and body count — including the exit of every other founding member of the band — he left no room for it in these 14 songs. "I bet you think I'm doin' this all for my health," Rose cracks through the saturation-bombing guitars in "I.R.S.," one of several glancing references on the album to what he knows a lot of people think of him: that Rose, now 46, has spent the last third of his life running off the rails, in half-light. But when he snaps, "All things are possible/I am unstoppable," in the thumper "Scraped," that's not loony hubris — just a good old rock & roll "fuck you," the kind that made him and the old band hot and famous in the first place.
Something else Rose broadcasts over and over on Chinese Democracy: Restraint is for suckers. There is plenty of familiar guitar firepower — the stabbing-dagger lick that opens the first track, "Chinese Democracy," the sand-devil fuzz in "Riad N' the Bedouins" and the looping squeals over the grand anguish of "Street of Dreams." But what Slash and Izzy Stradlin used to do with two guitars now takes a wall of 'em. On some tracks, Rose has up to five guys — Robin Finck, Buckethead, Paul Tobias, Ron "Bumblefoot" Thal and Richard Fortus — riffing and soloing in broad, saw-toothed blurs. And that's no drag. I still think the wild, superstuffed "Oh My God" — the early Chinese Democracy track wasted on the 1999 End of Days soundtrack — beats everything on Guns n' Roses' 1993 covers album, The Spaghetti Incident?
Most of these songs also go through multiple U-turns in personality, as if Rose kept trying new approaches to a hook or a bridge and then decided, "What the hell, they're all cool." "Better" starts with what sounds like hip-hop voicemail — severely pinched guitar, drum machine and a near-falsetto Rose ("No one ever told me when/I was alone/They just thought I'd know better") — before blowing up into vintage Sunset Strip wallop. "If the World" has Buckethead plucking acoustic Spanish guitar over a blaxploitation-film groove, while Rose shows that he still holds a long-breath vowel — part torture victim, part screaming jet — like no other rock singer.
And there is so much going on in "There Was a Time" — strings and Mellotron, a full-strength choir and Rose's overdubbed sour-growl harmonies, wah-wah guitar and a false ending (more choir) — that it's easy to believe Rose spent most of the past decade on that arrangement alone. But it is never a mess, more like a loud mass of bad memories and hard lessons. In the first lines, Rose goes back to a beginning much like his own — "Broken glass and cigarettes/ Writin' on the wall/It was a bargain for the summer/An' I thought I had it all" — then piles on the wreckage along with the orchestra and guitars. By the end, it's one big melt of missing and kiss-off ("If I could go back in time . . . But I don't want to know it now"). If this is the Guns n' Roses that Rose kept hearing in his head all this time, it is obvious why two guitars, bass and drums were never going to be enough.
It is plain, too, that he thinks this Guns n' Roses is a band, as much as the one that recorded "Welcome to the Jungle," "Sweet Child O' Mine," "Used to Love Her" and "Civil War." The voluminous credits that come with Chinese Democracy certainly give detailed credit where it is due. My favorite: "Initial arrangement suggestions: Youth on 'Madagascar." Rose takes the big one — "Lyrics N' Melodies by Axl Rose" — but shares full-song bylines with other players on all but one track. Bassist Tommy Stinson plays on nearly every song, and keyboardist Dizzy Reed, the only survivor from the Illusion lineup, does the Elton John-style piano honors on "Street of Dreams."
But Rose still sings a lot about the power of sheer, solitary will even when he throws himself into a bigger fight, like "Chinese Democracy." In "Madagascar," which Rose has played live for several years now, he samples both Dr. Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech and dialogue from Cool Hand Luke. And at the end of the album, on the bluntly titled "Prostitute," Rose veers from an almost conversational tenor, over a ticking-bomb shuffle, to five-guitar barrage, orchestral lightning and righteous howl: "Ask yourself/Why I would choose/To prostitute myself/To live with fortune and shame." To him, the long march to Chinese Democracy was not about paranoia and control. It was about saying "I won't" when everyone else insisted, "You must." You may debate whether any rock record is worth that extreme self-indulgence. Actually, the most rock & roll thing about Chinese Democracy is he doesn't care if you do.

www.rollingstone.com/reviews/album/24024297/review/24161281/chinese_democracy

DAVID FRICKE
(Posted: Nov 27, 2008)