The Zero Room

2005-11-26T13:16:00.000-07:00

Haloscan commenting and trackback have been added to this blog.

Water Jasmine

2005-08-26T05:39:00.000-06:00

Water Jasmine
Originally uploaded by Priory.

I found this on Yahoo News this morning, off the AP. Yahoo description:
"Malaysian Kuah Mershel, daughter of a bonsai cultivator, holds the smallest of her miniature bonsai at her residence in Kuala Lumpur August 24, 2005. These miniature bonsai from a local species known as 'water jasmine' measure 22mm. Picture taken late August 24, 2005. REUTERS/Kamarulzaman Russali"

Cool Welsh site

2005-08-24T10:06:00.000-06:00

I don't remember if I already posted this, but BBC - South East Wales Weird - Ghostcam - Llancaiach Fawr Manor is a really cool GhostCam website. Fun! And who knows? Maybe it's for real...

Stolen from Chandira

2005-03-21T13:30:00.000-07:00

Shamelessly stolen from Chandira's blog

The Minds of 6th Graders
The following were answers provided by 6th graders during a history test. Some of the best humor is in the misspelling...

1. Ancient Egypt was inhabited by mummies and they all wrote in hydraulics. They lived in the Sarah Dessert. The climate of the Sarah is such that all the inhabitants have to live elsewhere.

2. Moses led the Hebrew slaves to the Red Sea where they made unleavened bread, which is bread made without any ingredients. Moses went up on Mount Cyanide to get the Ten Commandments. He died before he ever reached Canada.

3. Solomon had three hundred wives and seven hundred porcupines.

4. The Greeks were a highly sculptured people, and without them we wouldn't have history. The Greeks also had myths. A myth is a female moth.

5. Socrates was a famous Greek teacher who went around giving people advice. They killed him. Socrates died from an overdose of wedlock. After his death, his career suffered a dramatic decline.

6. In the Olympic games, Greeks ran races, jumped, hurled biscuits, and threw the java.

7. Julius Caesar extinguished himself on the battlefields of Gaul. The Ides of March murdered him because they thought he was going to be king. Dying, he gasped out "Tee hee, Brutus."

8. Joan of Arc was burnt to a steak and was canonized by Bernard Shaw.

9. Queen Elizabeth was the "Virgin Queen". As a queen she was a success. When she exposed herself before her troops they all shouted, "Hurrah!"

10. It was an age of great inventions and discoveries. Guttenberg invented removable type and the Bible. Another important invention was the circulation of blood. Sir Walter Raleigh is a historical figure because he invented cigarettes and started smoking. Sir Francis Drake circumcised the world with a 100-foot clipper.

11. The greatest writer of the Renaissance was William Shakespeare. He was born in the year 1564, supposedly on his birthday. He never made much money and is famous only because of his plays. He wrote tragedies, comedies and hysterectomies all in Islamic pentameter. Romeo and Juliet are an example of a heroic couple. Romeo's last wish was to be laid by Juliet.

12. Writing at the same time as Shakespeare was Miguel Cervantes. He wrote "Donkey Hote". The next great author was John Milton. Milton wrote "Paradise Lost." Then his wife died and he wrote "Paradise Regained."

13. Delegates from the original 13 states formed the Contented Congress. Thomas Jefferson, a Virgin and Benjamin Franklin were two singers of the Declaration of Independence. Franklin discovered electricity by rubbing two cats backward and declared, "A horse divided against itself cannot stand." Franklin died in 1790 and is still dead.

14. Abraham Lincoln became Americas greatest Precedent. Lincoln's mother died in infancy, and he was born in a log cabin which he built with his own hands. Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves by signing the Emasculation Proclamation. On the night of April 14, 1865, Lincoln went to the theater and got shot in his seat by on of the actors in a moving picture show. They believe the assinator was John Wilkes Booth, a supposingly insane actor. This ruined Booth's career.

15. Johann Bach wrote a great many musical compositions and had a large number of children. In between he practiced on an old spinster which he kept in his attic. Bach died from 1750 to the present. Bach was the most famous composer in the world and so was Handel. Handel was half German, half Italian and half English. He was very large.

16. Beethoven wrote music even though he was deaf. He was so deaf he wrote loud music. He took long walks in the forest even when everyone was calling for him. Beethoven expired in 1827 and later died for this.

17. The nineteenth century was a time of great many thoughts and inventions. People stopped reproducing by hand and started reproducing by machine. The invention of the steamboat caused a network of rivers to spring up. Cyrus McCormick invented the McCormick raper, which did the work of hundred men. Louis Pasteur discovered a cure for rabbits.Charles Darwin was a naturalist who wrote the "Organ of the Species." Madman Curie discovered the radio. And Karl Marx became the first of the Marx Brothers.

Happy Saint Patrick's Day!

2005-03-17T08:17:00.000-07:00

Love the Pres or hate him, this is kinda cool, especially for those of us with a wee drop of Irish blood in our veins:

Irish-American Heritage Month, 2005
A Proclamation by the President of the United States of America

The story of the Irish in America is an important part of the history of our country. This month, we pay tribute to Americans of Irish descent who have shaped our Nation and influenced American life.

Long before the great wave of Irish immigration in the 1840s, people of Irish ancestry were defining and defending our Nation. Charles Thomson, an Irishman by birth, served as Secretary of the Continental Congress and helped design the Great Seal of the United States. Irish-born Commodore John Barry fought for our country's independence and later helped found the United States Navy.

Irish Americans have been leaders in our public life, and they have retained a proud reverence for their heritage. In June 1963, President John F. Kennedy spoke to the Parliament in Dublin and told the story of the Irish Brigade, a regiment that fought valiantly for the Union and suffered terrible losses during the Civil War. Two decades after President Kennedy's visit, President Ronald Reagan returned to his great grandfather's hometown in County Tipperary, Ireland, and greeted the crowd in their own Irish language.

The industry, talent, and imagination of Irish Americans have enriched our commerce and our culture. Their strong record of public service has fortified our democracy. Their strong ties to family, faith, and community have strengthened our Nation's character. The Irish are a significant reason why Americans will always be proud to call ourselves a Nation of immigrants.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim March 2005 as Irish American Heritage Month. I call upon all Americans to observe this month by celebrating the contributions of Irish Americans to our Nation.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this fourth day of March, in the year of our Lord two thousand five, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and twenty ninth.

GEORGE W. BUSH

Teachers

2005-03-15T07:36:00.000-07:00

Why is it that public school teachers--such as the one who reduced my youngest daughter to tears on Friday--feel that they are all-powerful beings? This whole thing with Ward Churchill has made me re-evaluate some things in my life, and now I have a teacher making my daughter cry. Oh, but that isn't the best part--when my daughter went to a school counsellor to complain about this teacher, she was told that the counsellor "applauded" this teacher's "teaching methods." Bear in mind that said teacher at one point told a student (not my daughter, but a friend of hers)--these are middle-schoolers--that the student would just have to wet their pants as they weren't going to be allowed to go to the bathroom. This was the "teaching method" that was "applauded" by the so-called counsellor.

Hey, I know utter and abject humiliation is one "teaching method" I sure "applaud!" (insert intense sarcasm...)

It's time the school system in this country stopped being an integral weirdo little world unto itself. If I had the $$$, my daughters would be in parochial schools.

The nerve of some people

2005-03-09T05:26:00.000-07:00

ROME (Reuters) - A man given six months to live by his doctors has been told by an Italian court to come back in 14 months to hear the outcome of his demand for insurance damages.

Now wouldn't it be funny if his family could actually take him back in 14 months? Gross and sacriligeous, but these judges would deserve it...

Just goes to show

2005-03-03T08:08:00.000-07:00

Actual text of e-mail I received yesterday from one of those 530 dear, sweet people:

"OK, sweetheart, you'll be removed because you asked so nicely, but I'm probably going to sign your e-mail address up to receive a lot of free offers at next year's Greater L A Auto Show!"

Cute, huh? From a supposedly grown man who shall remain nameless--as he so richly deserves--but whose initials, judging by his e-mail address, are V.G.M. What a sweetie...And this list, mind you, is composed of pseudo-intellectuals (with two notable exceptions, Noam Chomsky and Frank Drake--seriously!) who send posts with the word "UFO" used in all seriousness. Granted, I'm a huge fan of S.E.T.I., but come on...

On being in 530 different address books

2005-03-01T09:12:00.000-07:00

Okay, I just signed on to one of my Yahoo accounts, and found there, waiting for me, more than a dozen e-mails from people I have never heard of, let alone given my e-mail address to. When I went to reply to one of these, to ask to be taken from their address book, I found hundreds of e-mail addresses this particular message had been sent to. So, I took a deep breath, and carefully copied and pasted, into 6 different e-mails, five hundred and thirty (530) e-mail addresses. It took 6 different e-mails because Yahoo isn't equipped to send one e-mail to, let me just say this again because it is such a jolly fun number, five hundred and thirty (530) addresses at once. I am furious, and I know damn well how my name/e-mail addy got on this freaking list in the first place, but I will be the bigger person and once again refuse to name names publicly. If the person who crammed my Inbox chooses to name themselves on my blog, that's their own flippin' problem ;)

And then I printed out 24 pages of their e-mail addresses, so that I may know their faces should they arrive uninvited again...

It strikes me what an "instant" world we now live in. Someone can copy and paste my e-mail address to literally hundreds of other people, without my permission, without my awareness, and I have to deal with it as best I can. Needless to say, I will report each and every message I get from any of these--oooh here's that fun number again!-- five hundred and thirty (530) people as unsolicited spam. And this is different from my Blogger e-mail address by virtue of being a private e-mail address. Things like being added to address books because of being a public blogger--fine, that I can handle. These 530 people, however--well, that's a different matter entirely.

Sparky the Goldfish

2005-03-01T08:43:00.000-07:00

Chronicles of Sparky the Goldfish is the most adorable thing around! Way to go, whoever you are that started this unusual and endearing blog!!!

Dark matter galaxy

2005-02-23T04:40:00.000-07:00

I am fascinated by dark matter as it is, so this story from the Beeb is right up my alley!

Astronomers find star-less galaxy

The invisible galaxy could only be 'seen' using radio wavesAstronomers say they have discovered an object that appears to be an invisible galaxy made almost entirely of dark matter.

The team, led by Cardiff University, claimed it is the first to be detected.

A dark galaxy is an area in the Universe containing a large amount of mass that rotates like a galaxy, but contains no stars.

It was found 50 million light years away using radio telescopes in Cheshire and Puerto Rico.

The unknown material that is thought to hold these dark galaxies together is known as 'dark matter', but scientists still know very little about what that is.

The five-year research has involved studying the distribution of hydrogen atoms throughout the Universe, estimated by looking at the rotation of galaxies and the speed at which their components moved.

Hydrogen gas releases radiation that can be detected at radio wavelengths.

In the Virgo cluster of galaxies, they found a mass of hydrogen atoms a hundred million times the mass of the Sun.

The mysterious galaxy has been called VIRGOHI21.

Similar objects that have previously been discovered have since turned out to contain stars or be remnants of two galaxies colliding.

However, the scientists from the UK, France, Italy and Australia found no visible trace of any stars, and no galaxies nearby that would suggest a collision.

Dr Robert Minchin, of Cardiff University, said: "From its speed, we realised that VIRGOHI21 was a thousand times more massive than could be accounted for by the observed hydrogen atoms alone.

"If it were an ordinary galaxy, then it should be quite bright and would be visible with a good amateur telescope."

The astronomers say it is hard to study the universe's dark, hidden objects because of the Earth's proximity to the Sun.

They liken it to looking out at the darkest night from a well-lit room - it is easy to make out street lights but not trees, hedges and mountains.

Astronomers say it marks an important breakthrough because, according to cosmological models, dark matter is five times more abundant than the ordinary (baryonic) matter that makes up everything we can see and touch.

Another of the Cardiff team, Dr Jon Davies, added: "The Universe has all sorts of secrets still to reveal to us, but this shows that we are beginning to understand how to look at it in the right way. It's a really exciting discovery."

BBC NEWS Wales South East Wales Astronomers find star-less galaxy

Interesting Beliefnet article on presidential beliefs

2005-02-22T07:44:00.000-07:00

This is kinda interesting, from Beliefnet:

Tangents
Gregg Easterbrook

Bible-Cutters, Mystics, and Masons: Our Presidents The religious convictions of Jefferson, Lincoln, and Washington were far more controversial than George W. Bush's beliefs.

A version of this article first appeared on Beliefnet February 16, 2001.

Many in the United States are pleased or upset when George W. Bush leans heavily on religious symbolism in speaking about the anti-terror war and many other matters. But if George Washington or Abraham Lincoln were alive today–-or Thomas Jefferson, for that matter--their spiritual beliefs would be far more controversial than Bush’s, and not just because times change.

What did these great former presidents believe? Let's start with the first president.

When Washington ran for president, a few opponents tried to sully him as irreligious because he rarely attended services--though he was a vestryman in an Episcopal church in Alexandria, Virginia. Supporters answered that the Alexandria church was a two-hour horse ride each way from the general's beloved Mount Vernon, and therefore Washington usually held private vespers at home. That Washington was a believer can be found in statements such as this, from a 1778 letter about the Revolution: "The Hand of providence has been so conspicuous in all this, that he must be worse than an infidel that lacks faith." Imagine the reaction if any contemporary president declared that anyone who lacks faith is "worse than an infidel," especially since as used by Washington, infidel meant Muslim.

Convinced "the Hand of providence" was guiding the establishment of the United States, Washington joined many of the Founders in believing God was forming the new country partly so that people could realize a genuine, freely chosen worship of Jesus, impossible in the entrenched denominational wars of Europe. To Washington, like many of the Founders, civilization and Christianity were the same; it was just that in the Old World, the faith had become corrupted by politics. Without "our blessed religion," Washington said in his farewell address, "we can never hope to be a happy nation." When Washington negotiated with Indians regarding bringing their children into school systems--one of his pet causes--he did so partly owing to his belief that Christianity was essential to full humanity. "You do well to wish to learn our arts and our ways of life and above all, the religion of Jesus Christ," Washington once told a gathering of Delaware elders. "These will make you a greater and happier people." Imagine an American president today who advised minority group members that they must embrace Christ to become "greater and happier."

Yet though Washington's assumption of America as a Christian nation would seem right-wing by today’s standard, much of his theology would seem left-wing. Though historians dispute the details, Washington was probably a "deist"--a believer that nature, not revelation or church doctrine, was the proof of God.

Deism was the intellectual theology of Washington’s day, best expressed in Thomas Paine’s 1794 book, "The Age of Reason," which argued that clerics were spewing mumbo-jumbo and no one can be sure if the Bible is historically accurate, but we can be absolutely certain nature is so grand and intricate, it must be the work of a Creator. A favorite volume of many Founders, The Age of Reason was seen by the Anglican, Catholic, Congregational and Episcopal hierarchies of the day as a direct attack, since the book asserted that the rational person could ignore organized religion and come to his or her own conclusions about God. It would be as if, today, an American president were to declare that priests, rabbis, and ministers were mainly bureaucrats, scripture was a muddle, and each individual should arrive at his or her own spiritual beliefs through private meditation. This is more or less what George Washington thought, and a reason he preferred Vespers in rustic Mount Vernon to that Alexandria pew.

And what of Washington’s membership in the Masons? Today Freemasonry is a fraternal organization that mainly raises money for charity, but then it had a hushed, secretive connotation. The goofy internal lingo of Masonic temples, such as "the Supreme Councils of the Scottish Rite" or the "Grand Encampment of Knights Templar," was whispered about as evidence of conspiracy. Masonry, which originated in Anglican England, was during Washington's time often anti-Catholic. (In the 19th century, Masonry sometimes was anti-Semitic, which would not stop the Nazis of the 1930s from denouncing many German Jews as secret servants of the Freemasons.) The Masons are not a religion--their only spiritual requirement is that members accept the existence of a supreme being-- but at various points in history have been viewed as attempting to usurp or circumvent established faiths.

Even today, people don't know what to make of Washington’s Masonic ties. The largest privately built monument in the nation’s capitol area--the George Washington Masonic National Memorial in Alexandria, a huge pseudo-Egyptian spire that dominates the skyline for airplanes approaching Reagan National Airport--is routinely absent from tourist agendas, as if it were something about the Father of Our Country better left unmentioned. It's fun to consider the delightful negative ads a modern political consultant might be able to generate off candidate Washington's Masonic ties. Secret society! Clandestine rites! What really goes on in that Supreme Council?

Now to Lincoln. When he first ran for Congress in 1840, Lincoln was derided by opponents for not belonging to a church. Indeed, Abe was not a member of any church, and was sufficiently skeptical of organized religion that on his drinking nights, he entertained friends by doing a stand-up parody routine about a pompous, hypercritical minister. In 1858, Lincoln began using scripture language in public speaking--especially his popular "House Divided" speech, which extensively quoted Matthew. Northern abolitionists so embraced the "House Divided" speech that they began calling Lincoln the "new John the Baptist," playing on the fact that both shared an eccentric appearance and intense speaking style. But being called the new John the Baptist did not seem to bring Lincoln to faith. Even after his election as president in 1860, he told friends he remained an agnostic, quoting scripture mainly because it was so powerful. His initial view of the Civil War was not religious, either. Though many northern churches from the outset called the war God's vengeance against slavery, Lincoln would tell Horace Greeley early on, "My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union," not abolish slavery.

All this changed in winter of 1862, when Lincoln's adored little son Willie died of typhoid fever in the White House, father weeping uncontrollably in the next room. Mary Lincoln was driven to mysticism by the loss; soon she would be consulting mediums, trying to communicate with Willie on the Other Side. Lincoln turned to the Rev. Phineas Gurley of New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, located a few blocks from the White House. Gurley and the president began going on long walks. During one of the walks, Lincoln converted to Christianity, accepting Jesus as his personal savior. Though he never formally joined any denomination, Lincoln started attending Gurley's church twice a week and studying scripture avidly. When Joshua Speed, the Springfield store proprietor who was Lincoln's best friend during his carefree days, expressed surprise in 1864 to encounter Abe reading the Bible, Lincoln counseled him somberly, "Take all that you can of this book upon reason and the balance on faith, and you will live and die a happier man."

While this was happening, the course of the Civil War turned horrific. Lincoln was stunned by the bloodshed at Antietam in September 1862, where twice as many men died on a single day as had died in the entire War of 1812. Worse, Antietam was inconclusive, ensuring the carnage would go on. Lincoln began to adopt the radical religious view that the conflict was not meant to end quickly because the Civil War was God's retribution against the United States for holding slaves. That is, God actually wanted huge numbers of Americans to die, paying for the nation's sins.

Imagine President Bush saying that he believed the divine wanted Americans to die in terrorism attacks as retribution for times when Americans deliberately killed the innocent, such as the bombing of Dresden. Yet Lincoln said as much: "In the present Civil War it is quite possible that God's purpose is something different from the purpose of either party. God wills the contest and wills that it shall not end yet." In 1863, Lincoln declared a National Fast Day, saying, "We know that, by divine law, nations like individuals are subjected to punishments and chastisement in this world." The war, he went on, was "a punishment inflicted upon us for our presumptuous sins." Lincoln's increasingly fatalistic view was summed in his second inaugural address, in words that now line the Lincoln Memorial in Washington: that God wills the Civil War to continue "until all the wealth piled by the bond-man's two hundred years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid with another drawn with the sword."

As his views became more religious, increasingly Lincoln focused on the centrality of ending slavery, which today is seen as a civil rights issue but then was seen by most abolitionists first as a spiritual issue, because slave-holding was an abomination before God. The mainly faith-affiliated abolition movement rallied to Lincoln intensively in the 1864 election, which many initially believed Lincoln would lose to Democratic candidate George McClellan, who opposed the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln's reelection was based on nearly unanimous religious support. As Lincoln biographer David Donald has written, "The support the President received [in 1864] from religious groups was overwhelming. There probably never was an election in all our history into which the religion element entered so largely, and nearly all on one side." When Lincoln was assassinated on Good Friday, many ministers preached sermons comparing him to Jesus, and many newspaper editorials said the same. Surely he was the only American president ever spoken of in such terms.

And why not throw in Jefferson? He also was a deist, his famous declaration "we hold these truths to be self-evident" meaning that the principles of freedom could be proclaimed from nature, not from either human or divine law. And though Jefferson revered Jesus, saying Christ's teachings were "the sublimest system of morality that has ever been taught," he rejected the miracle accounts of the gospels. Jefferson wrote a short book, "The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth," that anticipated modern revisionism by presenting Christ as a beautiful mortal sage about whom supernatural talk was invented mythology. The normally daring Virginian declined to publish this work during his lifetime, showing it to friends but leaving instructions that the volume not be printed until after his death. Suffice it to say, an American president today might not venture to write a book rejecting the divinity of Jesus.In fact, Jefferson did most of his work on "The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth" (which remains in press under the title The Jefferson Bible) while sitting in the old White House. Late into the night, he sat pouring over the gospels with a razor and glue pot, physically splicing out miracle references and pasting together a non-supernatural account of Christ. If, today, a president sat up late at night cutting passages out of the Bible, the right would go ballistic, claiming sacrilege, while the left would be disgusted that a president would take religion so seriously as to be tormented by a thirst to find a version of faith he could believe. Compared with Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln, George W. Bush's religious beliefs seem quite conventional.

This piece was adapted from a version that appeared previously on Beliefnet.

King Tut mystery may finally be solved

2005-02-18T06:08:00.000-07:00

Tutankhamun Murder Mystery Hangs on March Report
Thu Feb 17, 8:16 AM ET
Science - Reuters

CAIRO (Reuters) - A team of experts expects to announce in March whether the latest test results on the mummified body of Tutankhamun will provide evidence for the theory that the boy pharaoh was murdered.

Zahi Hawass, head of the Egyptian government's Supreme Council for Antiquities, told Reuters that results from a high tech x-ray scan of the mummy would help explain a bone chip in the skull that has sparked the murder theory.

"This hole in the skull, people talked about it a lot, we have to tell the public and the scholars what is this hole exactly and therefore we need time," Hawass said.

"We are finishing the examination and the announcement will be at the beginning of March."

Although the treasures and artifacts from his burial tomb have famously toured the world, the mummified body of the boy king has been examined only four times in detail since British archaeologist Howard Carter stunned the archaeology community by finding Tutankhamun's tomb intact in 1922.

In January, the mummified corpse was given its first CT (computed tomography) scan, which uses special x-ray equipment to obtain image data from different body angles.

Archaeologists last opened the coffin in 1968, when an x-ray revealed the chip of bone in his skull which led to the theory that the king was killed with a blow to the head. His high priest and army commander have been mooted as chief suspects.

Tutankhamun ruled during a troubled and confusing period in Egyptian history, starting shortly after the death of the monotheist pharaoh Akhenaten in 1362 BC, who may have been his father.

Tutankhamun died just as he was reaching adulthood.

"Many things happened with the mummy. We are examining and answering all these questions," Hawass said.

Hawass said the team of experts was currently made up of Egyptians, including experts in pathology and anthropology, but said they would be joined by experts from Italy and Switzerland at the end of the month.

Of the wisdom of zero rooms

2005-02-16T04:39:00.000-07:00

It's days like today when I really wich that this virtual Zero Room was real, complete with the scent of roses and the pink walls ;) I woke up about an hour ago with a screaming headache, and so I already know that I'm in for a migraine-filled day of fun. And a few days ago, I found out I have high blood pressure, so that means I'm trying now to wean myself from things like Excedrin, which is loaded with caffeine. Hypertension, in a family whose recent history includes 2 dead of heart attacks at 34 years of age, and 1 dead of cancer that spread so rapidly it killed within one month. My grandparents died of fast-spreading cancer--my grandfather--and stroke--my grandmother, who had so many small strokes the day she died that the doctors lost count. My paternal grandfather died of a heart attack in his sleep. All of which adds up to me needing rather badly to find some way to relax and come down off the ceiling, which is where I normally reside ;)

And so, today, I plan on making loads of herbal teas and maybe hitting the local Vitamin Cottage to see if they have anything for migraines that might work vaguely as well as Excedrin. I also plan on curling up with an amazing book sent me by Chandira, and maybe printing out some stuff from Beliefnet.com. But I still wish I had a real Zero Room in which to do all of this!

Cookie girls redux

2005-02-11T12:35:00.000-07:00

Those nasty teenagers--they should stick to driving 100 mph in school zones, boozing it up, and keeping the toilet paper industry going by their creative artistic expressions in maple trees ;) Notice that they offered to pay this woman's med. bills, and she turned 'em down, then sued 'em for med. bill payment.

This is an older article than the one I posted a few minutes ago.

Teens' cookie deliveries crumble into $900 lawsuit
A neighbor says an anxiety attack sent her to the hospital after two girls dropped treats on her porch.
By Electa Draper The Denver Post

Durango, Colo. -- Two teenage girls trying to perform an act of kindness for their neighbors ended up being slapped with a medical bill for $900 after one neighbor suffered an anxiety attack when they knocked on her door at 10:30 p.m. delivering homemade cookies.

The incident began July 31, 2004, when the girls, Taylor Ostergaard, 17, and Lindsey Jo Zellitti, 18, decided to skip a dance and stay home and bake cookies for their neighbors.

Big mistake.

They were successfully sued for an unauthorized cookie drop on one porch. The deliveries consisted of half a dozen chocolate chip and sugar cookies accompanied by big hearts cut out of red or pink construction paper with the message: "Have a great night." The notes were signed, "Love, The T and L Club," code for Taylor and Lindsey.

At one of the nine scattered rural homes south of Durango where they delivered cookies that night, a 49-year-old woman became so terrified by the knocks on her door around 10:30 p.m. that she called the sheriff's department. Deputies determined that no crime had been committed.

But Wanita Renea Young ended up in the hospital emergency room the next day after suffering a severe anxiety attack she thought might be a heart attack.

A Durango judge Thursday awarded Young almost $900 to recoup her medical bills. She received nothing for pain and suffering.

"The victory wasn't sweet," Young said Thursday afternoon. "I'm not gloating about it. I just hope the girls learned a lesson."

Taylor's mother, Jill Ostergaard, said her daughter "cried and cried" after Judge Doug Walker handed down his decision in La Plata County Small Claims Court.

"She felt she was being punished for doing something nice," Jill Ostergaard said.

The judge said he didn't think the girls acted maliciously, but it was pretty late at night for them to be out. He didn't award any punitive damages.

Taylor and Lindsey declined to comment Thursday, saying only that they didn't want to say anything hurtful. Young said the girls showed "very poor judgment."

Just as dusk arrived a little after 9 p.m., Taylor and Lindsey began their deliveries. They didn't stop at houses that were dark. But where lights shone, the girls figured people were awake and in need of cookies. A kitchen light was on at Young's home.

Court records contain half a dozen letters from neighbors who said they enjoyed the unexpected treats. But Young, at home with her 18-year-old daughter and elderly mother, said she saw shadowy figures who banged and banged at her door. She thought they were burglars or some neighbors she had tangled with in the past, she said.

The girls wrote letters of apology to Young, with Taylor saying in part, "I just wanted you to know that someone cared about you and your family."

The families had offered to pay Young's medical bills if she would agree to indemnify the families against future claims. Young wouldn't sign the agreement. She said the families' apologies rang false and weren't delivered in person, so she brought the matter to court.

Colorado's cookie girls

2005-02-11T12:10:00.000-07:00

This is a local story that made national headlines--I can't help but be on the side of the girls, and I wonder how the "victim's" anxiety attacks are doing now that she's getting hate mail. Jeez, at 49, grow up already, honey. They're just cookies, not bombs. Hey, maybe I can sue the next "religious" group that bangs on my door for giving me anxiety! Or the U.P.S. guy who knocks on the door! Or the mailman who obviously needs something signed--gasp!--because here he comes to knock on my--gasp!--door. Some people, I swear...Ain't there enough to worry about for real on this planet than a couple of teenage girls being--gasp!--nice?

Cookie girls get big hand
KOA listeners pony up $4,000 to pay legal fees for bakers-turned-celebrities
By Felix Doligosa Jr., Rocky Mountain NewsFebruary 11, 2005

The last crumbs of the cookie case have been picked up.

Radio personalities Dave Logan and Scott Hastings of KOA-AM (850) gave $930 to Lindsey Zellitti and Taylor Ostergaard during their afternoon program Thursday. It was the amount the Durango teens were ordered to pay after being sued for a making an anonymous nighttime cookie delivery to a neighbor.

"Just to know people love and gave touched our hearts," said Ostergaard as she held back tears.

"It's been a rough experience, but we're not going to stop delivering cookies."

Wanita Renea Young, 49, sued the girls after they delivered two batches of cookies to her house last summer. The chocolate chip and sugar cookies each came with a note: "Have a great night" and "Love, The T and L Club."

Young said she suffered an anxiety attack after the delivery and a judge awarded her $930 for medical bills.

Her husband, Herb, said Thursday the couple has received "horrendous phone calls, tons of hate mail, threats to our life."

"It's horrible; nobody has heard our side," he said. "I don't believe the girls meant for this to happen. But they could have prevented it from happening if they had just shut their mouths when they came out of (small claims) court.

"Now they are caught in something they can't control."

The two 18-year-olds said they wanted only to do something nice for their neighbors when they decided to use a modified Betty Crocker recipe to make cookies.

"We felt really surprised when we were sued," said Zellitti, a freshman at Colby Community College in Kansas. "We didn't mean to harm her. We're glad to put it in the past."

The girls' story garnered widespread attention when they appeared on Good Morning America and were asked to be interviewed on several other national television shows. The Otis Spunkmeyer cookie company also named a cookie in their honor - calling it the "Kindness Cookie" - and the girls will determine the flavor of the treat.

"We're surround by cows and pigs," said Ostergaard, a senior at Durango High School. "We're not used to it (media attention). It's out of our element and it's been challenging."

When KOA heard about the case, it raised $4,000 from callers to help pay for the teens' legal expenses. The rest of the money was donated in their names to the Never Forgotten Fund, a scholarship fund for students in honor of those who died at Columbine High School in 1999.

The two girls plan to continue baking cookies, cakes and desserts for friends and strangers.

"We're not big on cooking," Ostergaard said. "Just enough to make people happy and full."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

"Mommy, why is the ocean blue?"

2005-02-11T09:21:00.000-07:00

This is cool!

Scientists Zero In on True Color of the Sea
Fri Feb 11, 7:55 AM ET
Top Stories - Los Angeles Times
By Kenneth R. Weiss Times Staff Writer

How blue is the ocean? How green is the sea?

The color of seawater, a key measure of ocean health, is coming into sharper focus due to a breakthrough in analyzing satellite images.

A group of NASA and university scientists on Thursday announced it had figured how to measure the hue and brightness of ocean coloration that, in turn, reflects changes in the tiny plants that provide the base of the ocean food chain and supply half of the world's oxygen.

The new techniques, scientists say, hold great promise in helping measure changes in ocean plankton, which besides being the undersea lungs of the planet also help determine how many fish are produced.

Phytoplankton exhale life-giving oxygen and are consumed as food by zooplankton and small fish, which, in turn, are eaten by larger fish.

Using earlier versions of the satellite imagery, other scientists from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have noted a worrisome decline of phytoplankton over the last 20 years, possibly a result of global warming.

Michael Behrenfeld, a biological oceanographer at Oregon State University, said the new techniques should eventually result in a much more precise picture of phytoplankton, the ocean's basic biological building block.

Increased clarity will help determine how well ocean health is holding up under stresses such as pollution and global warming.

"We haven't made it to Oz yet," Behrenfeld said, who recently left NASA. "But today we are announcing we have found the Yellow Brick Road."

Scientists say the importance of phytoplankton cannot be overestimated.

These single-cell plants, too tiny to be seen without magnification, are so numerous that their collective weight would be more than all of the trees and shrubs and other terrestrial plants.
They absorb nearly half of the world's human-produced carbon dioxide, lessening the effect of this primary greenhouse gas linked to global warming. For two decades, scientists have used satellites to study plankton on a global scale by measuring the color of the oceans.

Seawater changes from blue to green as the abundance of phytoplankton increases, and researchers have used this color to determine the overall quantity of plankton.

But this was only half of the picture. The other half was how fast these plankton are growing, an important factor given how quickly phytoplankton bloom and die or are consumed — usually within six days.

Using a new analytical formula, scientists can measure how green the hue, and this "greenness" provides an indication of how fast plankton are growing.

Phytoplankton, like other plants, shed pigment, or chlorophyll, from their cells, and quit growing when stressed by changes in temperature, light or nutrients.

One of the trickiest parts of measuring this, said David Siegel, a UC Santa Barbara geology professor, was correcting for brighter light bouncing back from land and the atmosphere. "The ocean isn't the brightest target," he said.

Siegel likened the project, which is being published by the journal Global Biogeochemical Cycles, to fiddling with the settings for color and brightness on a television set.

In this case, the new mathematical formula to achieve those settings took a decade to perfect.

How can I get mining rights?

2005-02-10T05:09:00.000-07:00

I wanna be an astronaut now ;)

I Come from Planet Tiffany....
Tue Feb 8, 8:39 AM ET
Oddly Enough - Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Some planets in our galaxy could harbor an unexpected treasure: a thick layer of diamonds hiding under the surface, astronomers reported on Monday.

No diamond planet exists in our solar system, but some planets orbiting other stars in the Milky Way might have enough carbon to produce a diamond layer, Princeton University astronomer Marc Kuchner said in a telephone news conference.

That kind of planet would have to develop differently from Earth, Mars and Venus, so-called silicate planets made up mostly of silicon-oxygen compounds.

Carbon planets might form more like some meteorites than like Earth, which is believed to have condensed from a disk of gas orbiting the sun.

In gas with extra carbon or too little oxygen, carbon compounds like carbides and graphite could form instead of silicates, Kuchner said at a conference on extrasolar planets in Aspen, Colorado.

Any condensed graphite would change into diamond under the high pressures inside carbon planets, potentially forming diamond layers inside the planets many miles thick.

Carbon planets would be made mostly of carbides, although they might have iron cores and atmospheres. Carbides are a kind of ceramic used to line the cylinders of motorcycle engines among other things, Kuchner said.

Planets orbiting the pulsar PSR 1257+12 may be carbon planets, possibly forming from the disruption of a star that produced carbon as it aged, he said.

Other good candidates for carbon planets might be those located near the galaxy's center, where stars have more carbon than the sun. In fact, the galaxy as a whole is becoming richer in carbon as it gets older, raising the possibility all planets in the future may be carbon planets, Kuchner said.

Hope diamond from French crown

2005-02-10T05:02:00.000-07:00

I wonder if they'll ask for it back? One of the Hope's owners, Evelyn Walsh McLean, lived in my home state of Colorado at one time. This is a cool story:

Study Finds Hope Diamond From French Crown
Wed Feb 9, 9:04 PM ET
Science - AP
By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - Researchers using computer analysis have traced the origin of the famed Hope Diamond, concluding that it was cut from a larger stone that was once part of the crown jewels of France.

A French connection had been suspected for the Hope, but the new study shows just how it would have fit inside the larger French Blue Diamond and how that gem was cut, Smithsonian gem curator Jeffrey Post explained.

The deep blue Hope Diamond is the centerpiece of the gem collection at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, famed for its claimed history of bad luck for its owners. It's been good fortune for the museum, though, drawing millions of visitors.

Post said the new analysis of the diamond took a year, with researchers using sketches from pre-Revolutionary France, scientific studies of the French crown jewels and computer models.

"This new Hope Diamond research would not have been possible 10 years ago," said Post. "What is exciting is that we are constantly learning new information about our collections as we apply new high-tech research methods. Even the Hope Diamond is grudgingly giving up some of its secrets."

The research helps confirm the Hope Diamond as originating with a 115-carat stone found in India in 1668. That stone was sold to King Louis XIV of France who had it cut into the 69-carat French Blue. The French Blue was stolen during the French Revolution.

Just over twenty years later, after the statute of limitations expired, a large blue diamond was quietly put up for sale in London, and eventually Henry Philip Hope purchased it.

Finally donated to the Smithsonian by jeweler Harry Winston, the now 45.52 carat stone is the world's largest blue diamond.

The team of researchers led by Post and Steven Attaway, engineer and gem cutter; as well as Scott Sucher and Nancy Attaway, gem cutting experts, compiled the new analysis.

While the French Blue no longer exists, Post said the sketches of it from France were quite detailed and allowed preparation of a computer model of that stone.

In 1700, French scientists had also studied several stones from the royal collection, determining their specific gravity and other details.

Their analysis of other stones that still exist was quite accurate, Post said in a telephone interview, so the researchers felt the data on the French Blue was also probably accurate.

After using the sketches and analysis to make the computer model of the French Blue, and at the same time measuring the Hope Diamond and entering that data into the computer, the researchers "virtually placed the Hope back inside the French Blue" Post said.

"It turns out it actually fits perfectly in only one way, but at that orientation, when you saw how it fit, you could see why it was cut the way it is," Post said.

"They cut he corners off the French Blue, changed slightly the angle of the bottom facets, and that produced the Hope Diamond," he said.

Indeed, some of the facets of the current diamond may even be left over from the French Blue.

On the Net:
National Museum of Natural History: http://www.si.edu

Blech

2005-02-10T04:49:00.000-07:00

Prince Charles is going to marry that sorry-looking horse-faced tramp he's been shtupping for decades. Blech. Blech. Blech. Even thinking about this...thing...being called "Princess" anything makes me sick. Blech. Just goes to show that you can be an adulterer for years, and top that off by lying about it and being a complete and total shit to said wife--and still become King of England--sanctioned by the Church of England, who now apparently don't see adultery as being anything wrong in the least when it comes to the throne--with the miserable nasty whore you cheated with by your side. And of course since your Mummy loathed said wife in the first place, you can also rest assured that Mummy will give the new wife an actual freakin' title. In America, we have problems with our elected folks, but we know that we can and will get rid of them eventually (after all, Presidents can only serve a max of 8 years). In England, maybe, just maybe, it's time for a change.

Prince Charles to marry Camilla

The ceremony will be held at Windsor Castle and Mrs Parker Bowles will take the title HRH the Duchess of Cornwall.

When the Prince of Wales, 56, becomes King, Camilla, 57, will not be known as Queen Camilla but as the Princess Consort, Clarence House added.

Charles said he and his wife-to-be were "absolutely delighted" at the engagement.

The move will end years of speculation on a relationship which has spanned the decades since they first met in 1971.

The wedding will be a civil ceremony, which will be followed by a service of prayer and dedication in St George's Chapel at which the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, will preside.

"The Duke of Edinburgh and I are very happy that the Prince of Wales and Mrs Parker Bowles are to marry," said the Queen, in a statement issued on her behalf by Buckingham Palace.

Charles was married to Diana, Princess of Wales, who died in a car crash in Paris in 1997.

The princess famously referred to Mrs Parker Bowles as one of the contributing factors in the breakdown of her marriage to Charles.

The couple, who had two sons - princes William and Harry - had divorced when Diana died.

A spokeswoman for Princess Diana's brother, Earl Spencer, said he would not be making any comment on the wedding announcement.

Religious reaction?

Conservative leader Michael Howard said he was "delighted" at the news, but Downing Street has refused to comment until a full statement is released by Clarence House.

The marriage is likely to be a sensitive issue because Mrs Parker Bowles is divorced and her former husband is still alive.

If he became king, Charles would be the supreme governor of the Church of England and some Anglicans remain opposed to the remarriage of divorcees.

The Archbishop of Canterbury said: "I am pleased that Prince Charles and Mrs Camilla Parker Bowles have decided to take this important step."

He added that he hoped the marriage would be "a source of comfort and strength" to the couple and those close to them.

BBC Royal Correspondent Nicholas Witchell said: "This is a step not without considerable risk by the Royal Family.

"They will be watching very carefully to see how public opinion unfolds."

Public opinion

Last year, a poll indicated that more Britons support Prince Charles marrying Camilla Parker Bowles than oppose it.

Of those who responded to a Populus poll, 32% said they would support Charles if he remarried, while 29% were opposed.

However, most people - 38% - said they did not care, while 2% had no opinion.

Mrs Parker Bowles has joined the Prince at numerous engagements in recent years - mostly at evening events for The Prince's Trust.

Clarence House staff were at pains to point out that she attended these events in a private capacity.

But the impending wedding will now allow her to be at the Prince's side full-time in an official capacity.

Neat facts

2005-02-09T11:54:00.000-07:00

These are from my youngest daughter, and I haven't checked them for accuracy, but they're cool!

If you yelled for 8 years, 7 months and 6 days you would have produced enough sound energy to heat one cup of coffee.

If you farted consistently for 6 years and 9 months, enough gas is produced to create the energy of an atomic bomb.

A cockroach will live nine days without its head before it starves to death.

Banging your head against a wall uses 150 calories an hour. (Do not try this)

The flea can jump 350 times its body length. It's like a human jumping the length of a football field.

A catfish has over 27,000 taste buds.

Some lions mate over 50 times a daay.

Butterflies taste with their feet.

The strongest muscle in the body is the tongue.

Right-handed people live, on average, nine years longer than left-handed people.

Elephants are the only animals that cannot jump.

A cat's urine glows under a black light.

An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain.

Starfish have no brains.

Polar bears are left-handed.

Ewwww

2005-02-02T07:01:00.000-07:00

Stolen shamelessly from Diary of a Hope Fiend, Chandira's blog:

February - 1373, from L. februarius mensis "month of purification," from februa "purifications" (plural of februum), of unknown origin, said to be a Sabine word. The last month of the ancient (pre-450 B.C.E.) Roman calendar, so named in reference to the Roman feast of purification, held on the ides of the month. In Britain, replaced O.E. solmonað "mud month." English first (c.1200) borrowed it from O.Fr. Feverier, which yielded feoverel before a respelling to conform to Latin.

Well, I know where this comes from! 'Februa' were strips of flesh torn from sacrifices to the Gods done in Rome, goats, cows, etc, for purification, and fertility rites. Women were 'whipped' with them in the streets by the priests, and this was a sign of blessings of fertility in the coming year. Some would hide that didn't want another child, and some would feel it as a great blessing. You've all heard of the famous Roman Orgies?? The 'ides' of Feb coincide with... Valentines Day!!

Bloggie awards

2005-01-27T08:42:00.000-07:00

LOL, I know I'm not nominated ;) but if you click here Fairvue Central >> Bloggies >> Fifth Annual Weblog Awards you'll be taken to the Bloggie Awards website. Way cool stuff here!

The funniest damned thing!

2005-01-25T18:18:00.000-07:00

Found this on another blog, and had to post it here. You have got to try this! It's hysterical! And be sure to read all of the directions you get after you try it.

1. Go to MSN Maps & Directions.
2. In the Start section, select "Norway" from the country list and enter "Haugesund" into the "City" field.
3. In the End section, select "Norway" from the country list and enter "Trondheim" into the "City" field.
4. Click on "Get Directions."

When horoscopes nail it

2005-01-25T08:35:00.000-07:00

Today's horoscope for me:

Tuesday, January 25, 2005
You may feel like someone is right in your face now. It feels as if you are under attack, but chances are that you are simple reacting to the intensity of the situation with a basic need to protect yourself. Your boundaries are vitally important. Try to maintain your sovereignty without necessarily going on the offensive.

Scream therapy

2005-01-21T16:17:00.000-07:00

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
GGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG
HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
WITH CHERRIES ON!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Okay, better now...

First of the first anniversaries

2004-12-04T06:24:00.000-07:00

Today is the first anniversary of my brother's first heart attack, the heart attack that led to his death in his sleep in the early morning hours of December 12, 2003. And so, understandably, I'm finding it extremely hard to concentrate today (and it's not yet 6:30 a.m.).

My oldest daughter has a Hero's Journey paper due Monday, one which has to be based on a movie, and she's chosen "Finding Nemo," which we finally bought on DVD the other day, so I'm going to help her with the project--maybe, maybe, that'll keep my mind busy...

I always heard that the holiday season is the hardest after you've lost someone you love, and in my brother's case, it's so true. He died in December, so the month itself now has negative and sorrowful connotations. I once loved the song "Once Upon a December" from the animated version of "Anastasia"...Now, it brings tears, and memories of my brother...

He was just 34 when he died, and my parents and myself are still struggling with the entire thing...In light of the new blog I began last night, a blog about missing children, I have to say that, dealing with this when the cause is known and when the person in question is 34 years old, is difficult enough. I cannot even begin to imagine the grief the parents of missing children feel...

Okay, enough mindless prattle. Off to face the day...

Headless bodies found at pyramid

2004-12-02T16:48:00.000-07:00

Not modern bodies, but still, this is gruesome...

Headless bodies found at mysterious pyramid
By Brian Winter

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - The discovery of a tomb filled with decapitated bodies suggests Mexico's 2,000 year-old "Pyramid of the Moon" may have been the site of horrifically gory sacrifices, archaeologists say.

The tomb at Teotihuacan, the first major city built in the Americas, whose origins are one of history's great mysteries, also held the bound carcasses of eagles, dogs and other animals.

"It is hard to believe that the ritual consisted of clean, symbolic performances -- it is most likely that the ceremony created a horrible scene of bloodshed with sacrificed people and animals," Saburo Sugiyama, one of the scientists leading the ongoing dig, said on Thursday.

"Whether the victims and animals were killed at the site or a nearby place, this foundation ritual must have been one of the most terrifying acts recorded archeologically in Mesoamerica."

Of the 12 human bodies found, 10 were decapitated and then tossed, rather than arranged, on one side of the burial site. The two other bodies were richly ornamented with beads and a necklace made of imitation human jaws.

The Aztecs came across Teotihuacan's towering stone pyramids in about 1500 A.D., centuries after the city was torched and abandoned. It is not known what language its inhabitants spoke, but the Aztecs named it "The Place Where Men Become Gods," believing it was a divine site.

A major tourist site, it lies about 35 miles (56 km) northeast of Mexico City.

After 200 years of excavations, archaeologists are still largely in the dark about the origins of the city, which is believed to have housed 200,000 people at its peak in 500 A.D. -- rivalling Shakespeare's London, but a millennium earlier.

Sugiyama said the nearly complete excavation indicates the Pyramid of the Moon was significant to its builders as a site for celebrating state power through ceremony and sacrifice.

The sacrifices were carried out during the expansion of one of the city's major monuments, suggesting the government wanted to symbolize growing sacred political power.

"Contrary to some past interpretation, militarism was apparently central to the city's culture," the excavation team said in a statement.

The master-planned city-state collapsed around 700 A.D., an event as mysterious as its formation.

It was the site of a modern-day controversy earlier this year when protesters fought and lost a battle to keep the Mexican unit of retail giant Wal-Mart Stores Inc. from building a new store a half-mile (800 metres) away.

"Memory mapping" project

2004-12-02T09:14:00.000-07:00

This sounds kind of cool!

Where have you been? Think of the first place you remember living. Think of the streets, pathways, bodies of water, train tracks and intersections that you remember. Try to remember the relationships of each. Find the farthest edges of each in your mind.You are invited to participate in memorymapping, a public project compiling a world atlas of collective and individual experiences of place. Add your maps to the memoryBase, to share your version of a complex story of what constitutes "place" and "home."

The link: memorymapping - [expandedfield.com]

Fast food cereal

2004-12-02T08:53:00.000-07:00

I saw a spot on this company on the Today show a few days ago, and it made me crave a bowl of cereal! I'm going on the Cereality website and seeing if they have mail order...

All-Cereal Restaurant Opens in Philly
Thu Dec 2, 3:30 AM ET
Health - AP
By JOANN LOVIGLIO, Associated Press Writer

PHILADELPHIA - How's this for thinking outside the box: a cafe with jammies-clad servers pouring cereal day and night, topping it off with everything from fruit to malted milk balls, and serving it in "bowls" resembling Chinese takeout containers. It's all cereal. Seriously.

Cereality Cereal Bar & Cafe, which opened its first sit-down cafe Wednesday on the University of Pennsylvania campus, is a sugarcoated — and tongue-in-cheek — homage to what your mother always told you was the most important meal of the day. But she probably never dished out bowls of Froot Loops and Cap'n Crunch topped with Pop Rocks.

Behind glass-door kitchen-style cabinets at Cereality are 30 varieties of brand-name cold cereal.

Customers order from "cereologists," whose most popular mix is two 8-ounce scoops with one of 36 toppings, plus regular, flavored or soy milk for $2.95. Also offered are cereal bars and made-to-order cereal smoothies and yogurt blends.

Though some of the choices sound like a sugar overdose or a dental disaster to the uninitiated (or to those long past their college years), they're not all that indulgent.

"This is great because you can try all different kinds and not have to buy the whole box," said Penn freshman Erica Denhoff, 18, as she munched on a healthy concoction of Quaker Oat Squares, Corn Chex and yogurt flax bark with skim milk. "I'm on the track team. ... I eat cereal for breakfast and for a snack if I need energy."

Co-founders David Roth and Rick Bacher opened the first Cereality, a 200-square-foot kiosk in Arizona State University's student union, last year. Besides the 1,500-square-foot Philadelphia cafe in the middle of Penn's retail district, the Boulder, Colo.-based company wants to open more than a dozen Cerealities next year on campuses, hospital lobbies, airports and office buildings.

"We don't see this as (solely) a college concept, we see this as being relevant to the 95 percent of the American public that eats cereal," Roth said. If college students — "the most cynical market we can go after" — like it, Roth's confident that office workers and travelers will like it too.

Cereality also offers its own combos with names reminiscent of Ben and Jerry's ice creams. John Merz, a 27-year-old Penn employee, was bowled over by Devil Made Me Do It — an ambrosial elixir of Cocoa Puffs, Lucky Charms, chocolate crunchies and malt balls, topped with milk.

"I'm always on a sugar high, so this doesn't make that much of a difference," he said with a laugh that sounded sugar-influenced despite his assertion.

"You're eating candy with milk on it!" chided his co-worker Caroline Couture, 42. After polishing off her Banana Brown Betty with hot oatmeal, bananas, molasses sugar and streusel topping, she said that she'd be having a salad for lunch — but that she'd visit Cereality again.

"We're all still kids, really," she said. "A lot of the foods you loved in childhood you still love as an adult."

In Philadelphia, customers can eat Apple Jacks and stretch out on a couch (Mom might not approve, but it's OK here), watch cartoons on a flat-screen TV or check their e-mail via free Wi-Fi access.

Like build-your-own salad bars with fattening and healthy foods side by side, "I think this is something that's as good or as bad as you want it to be," said Jeanne Goldberg of Tufts University's Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy.

American Dietetic Association spokeswoman Gail Frank agreed that cereals can be a good fast food because they're high in fiber and loaded with vitamins and minerals — as long as customers keep their sweet tooths in check and pick healthier toppings like nuts and fruit.

Between bites of hot oatmeal with cranberries and almonds, Penn junior Alpha Mengistu, 20, said Cereality offered more than a quick carb- and sugar-load.

"I think this would be a good place for a date," she said. "You could learn a lot about a person by what cereal they choose."

Washington State's top polluter

2004-12-02T08:51:00.000-07:00

I lived in Bellingham, WA, for 5 years, and I still miss the air there, the smell of the ocean.

Mount St. Helens Is State's Top Polluter
Thu Dec 2, 3:32 AM ET
Science - AP

SEATTLE - Washington state's top polluter isn't a pulp mill, a power plant or refinery. It's the newly awakened Mount St. Helens.

Since the volcano began erupting in early October, it has been pumping out 50 to 250 tons a day of sulfur dioxide, the lung-stinging gas that causes acid rain and contributes to haze. At peak, that's more than double the amount from all the state's industries combined.

Normally, the state's No. 1 polluter is a coal-fired power plant owned by the Canadian firm TransAlta. The plant churned out 200 tons a day of sulfur dioxide until regulators demanded $250 million worth of renovations, bringing the level down to 27 tons a day.

Tough to get those kind of results from a volcano.

"You can't put a cork in it," said Greg Nothstein of the Washington Energy Policy Office.

Because the area around St. Helens is so sparsely populated, officials say they haven't heard complaints about respiratory problems linked to the emissions. But people with breathing ailments probably would feel the effects if they lived close to it, said Bob Elliott, executive director of the Southwest Clean Air Agency.

"We are very fortunate, in terms of the impact on human health, that Mount St. Helens is pretty remote," Elliott said.

Worldwide, sulfur dioxide emissions from volcanoes add up to about 15 million tons a year, compared to the 200 million tons produced by power plants and other human activities.

The arrival of the blog

2004-12-01T15:05:00.000-07:00

And we ain't never leavin'...

'Blog' Tops Dictionary's Words of the Year
Wed Dec 1, 9:08 AM ET
Oddly Enough - Reuters
By Greg Frost

BOSTON (Reuters) - A four-letter term that came to symbolize the difference between old and new media during this year's presidential campaign tops U.S. dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster's list of the 10 words of the year.

Merriam-Webster Inc. said on Tuesday that blog, defined as "a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments and often hyperlinks," was one of the most looked-up words on its Internet sites this year.

Eight entries on the publisher's top-10 list related to major news events, from the presidential election -- represented by words such as incumbent and partisan -- to natural phenomena such as hurricane and cicada.

Springfield, Massachusetts-based Merriam-Webster compiles the list each year by taking the most researched words on its Web sites and then excluding perennials such as affect/effect and profanity.

The company said most online dictionary queries were for uncommon terms, but people also turned to its Web sites for words in news headlines.

"That is what occurred in this year's election cycle ... with voluminous hits for words like 'incumbent,' 'electoral,' 'partisan,' and, of course, our number one Word of the Year, 'blog,'"
Merriam-Webster President and Publisher John Morse said in a statement.

Americans called up blogs in droves for information and laughs ahead of the Nov. 2 presidential election.

Freed from the constraints that govern traditional print and broadcast news organizations, blogs spread gossip while also serving as an outlet for people increasingly disenchanted with mainstream media.

It was mainly on blogs that readers first encountered speculation that President Bush wore a listening device during his first debate against Democrat John Kerry. The White House, forced to respond, called it a laughable, left-wing conspiracy theory.

Bloggers also were among the first to cast doubt on a CBS television news report that challenged Bush's military service.

CBS later admitted it had been duped into using questionable documents for the report. Last week CBS anchor Dan Rather said he would step down in March, although the network said the move was unconnected to the scandal.

A Merriam-Webster spokesman said it was not possible to say how many times blog had been looked up on its Web sites but that from July onward, the word received tens of thousands of hits per month.

Blog will be a new entry in the 2005 version of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition.

The complete list of words of the year is available at
http://www.merriam-webster.com/info/04words.htm

Thanksgiving

2004-11-30T14:17:00.000-07:00

All in all, we had a pretty decent Thanksgiving this year, though since last Thanksgiving was my brother's last, this one was a bit...odd. Strained. And it made me wonder, not for the first time, exactly how that mythical first Thanksgiving really played out. The word "strained" has to come close to describing it, doesn't it?

Okay, maybe I'm feeling sorry for myself as today is my eldest daughter's 16th birthday--where in hell did time go?--and therefore I am, today, feeling old and icky. Perhaps that's coloring my view of most holidays right now? Although, for some perverse reason, I am really looking forward to Christmas this year.

Wow, okay, that was rambling and nonsensical! I want to research holidays and their origins right now--it's been a while since I felt like really delving into anything, and this should be fun! If anyone reads this and has some website suggestions, let me know!

What I'm thankful for--my family, my friends (and included in those are my online friends!), my health (gawd, does that sound like an old lady, or what?) and the mind with which I function. Sounds odd, but there it is ;) I am supremely grateful that I am able to do the delving I do, like some sort of mole, ever on some new scent, some new trail. I am grateful that I am curious, that I am not content with the status quo, that as a born-and-bred Catholic I can at my age decide to look deeply into Hinduism. Grateful, I guess, that I am very, very alive...

Hugs, Bloggerverse!

Oldest printed porn to be auctioned

2004-11-29T05:21:00.000-07:00

17th Century British Porn to Be Auctioned
Fri Nov 26,10:11 AM ET
Oddly Enough - Reuters

LONDON (Reuters) - The world's first known piece of printed pornography, described as the "quintessence of debauchery," is expected to reach up to 35,000 pounds ($65,040) when it is auctioned next month.

"Sodom," penned in the mid-1670s, has been attributed to John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester and is described by auction house Sotheby's as a "closet drama rather than for the stage" with pornography "in almost every line."

"We believe this is the first printed pornography in English literature, a unique copy of the quintessence of debauchery," Peter Beal, Sotheby's book specialist said.

"It is one of the most notorious publications in literature and makes most pornography written 300 years later seem tame."

The book centers on the decision made by a lustful King to "set the nation free" by allowing "buggary" to be "used thro' all the land" and then details the dire consequences.

The book, the only surviving copy, will be auctioned on December 16.

Ripperology

2004-11-26T07:15:00.000-07:00

I must confess--I, too, have always been obsessed with this case. I personally think Cornwell nailed it, however--her book is extremely convincing.

Why are we obsessed with Jack the Ripper?
By Finlo Rohrer BBC News

A shadowy figure clad in a top hat and cape, carrying a shiny leather bag through the London fog, the popular image of Jack the Ripper continues to be iconic 116 years after he terrorised the East End.

This week, press reports of tests on a watch led to the finger again being pointed at James Maybrick, a 19th Century Liverpool cotton merchant.

It is a criminal case where a year rarely goes by without a new development or conspiracy theory, but those investigating admit it will almost certainly never be solved.

So why do legions of Jack the Ripper enthusiasts, known as Ripperologists, remain obsessed by the identity of the killer who mutilated prostitutes in the area around Whitechapel?

For Paul Begg, author of upcoming book Jack the Ripper: The Facts, the killer has become more than a match for any fictional figure from the world of horror.

"There are an awful lot of people, particularly in the States, who don't believe Jack the Ripper actually existed. They think he is a fictional character along with Frankenstein and Dracula.

"For most people Jack the Ripper personifies the fear that we all have of the lurker in the shadows, that thing we can offer no defence against."

Sickert row

New books are released every year, many of them identifying a new wealthy Victorian candidate for the crimes and an elaborate conspiracy theory for the Ripperologists to gorge themselves on.

They populate the message boards of the comprehensive Casebook website and argue endlessly over the multitude of competing hypotheses.

But US detective novelist Patricia Cornwell has perhaps gone further than any other Ripperologist in her search for the truth.

Spending as much as $6m researching her book, she named celebrated British artist Walter Sickert as the murderer.

THE SUSPECTS
Prince Albert Victor - grandson of Queen Victoria
James Maybrick - Liverpool cotton merchant
Walter Sickert - Artist
Aaron Kosminski - Polish Jewish immigrant
Michael Ostrog - Thief
Montague John Druitt - Barrister and teacher
Francis Tumblety - US quack doctor
Joseph Barnett - Boyfriend of victim
Countless others

She generated outrage in the art world by having a Sickert painting cut up, and purchased 31 other works in her quest to prove the artist was the killer using a barrage of forensic tests.

But despite the definitive title Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper - Case Closed, she was unable to prove Sickert's guilt and her theory was widely dismissed by leading Ripperologists.

To Trevor Marriott, a retired murder squad detective from Bedfordshire, not only will the case never be solved, but all of the facts will remain disputed, even down to whether the Ripper killed more than the five women attributed to him.

"There are a hardcore of people throughout the world who will always be interested. There are people who live and die the Ripper.

"I sometimes wonder whether they want the crime to be solved. There are some people who won't accept any facts. Nothing's ever going to change them."

Mr Marriott, who has spent more than a decade researching the killings since his retirement in 1988, said he had sympathy for the officers who had failed to catch the killer.

"A lot of my police service was at a time when we didn't have modern forensic methods. These methods have come to the forefront in my time.

"It was good old fashioned police work, which was all they had at the time of the Ripper murders.

WHITECHAPEL MURDERS
3 April 1888 - Emma Elizabeth Smith
7 August 1888 - Martha Tabram
31 August 1888 - Mary Ann Nichols*
8 September 1888 - Annie Chapman*
30 September 1888 - Elizabeth Stride*
30 September 1888 - Catherine Eddowes*
9 November 1888 - Mary Jane Kelly*
20 December 1888 - Rose Mylett
17 July 1889 - Alice McKenzie
10 September 1889 - Unknown woman
13 February 1891 - Frances Coles
* Usually identified as the Ripper murders

"As a detective something like this is always of interest. You try to apply modern day investigative techniques. If I had been around then, what would I have done differently. They seem to have missed a lot of avenues of inquiry that I would have pursued.

"I regret not having now the power of a police officer to go to places and demand things. It does prove difficult."

For Neil Storey, author of A Grim Almanac of Jack the Ripper's London, the rise of the iconic imagery of the killer is tied into the rise of the "gutter press".

"To writers at the turn of the century, the East End was a Third World in the most powerful empire in the world, with poverty akin to the poorest corners, it was a phenomenon.

"When this series of murders come along that are incredible, are unsolved, it ties in with this mysterious world of poverty, and it rings all the bells that that the various media had.

"Pure unadulterated crime and disaster [was the making] of the gutter press.

"He became a stalking bogeyman that children were threatened with, a folk devil. Kids had skipping rhymes and played catch games that mentioned him."

Along with Patricia Cornwell's controversial work, the most hotly disputed theory is that naming James Maybrick as the man responsible.

A diary, alleged to be that of Maybrick, and containing his confession to the gruesome killings, was made public in the early 1990s.

But it has failed to convince most of the leading Ripper authors, who accept that while it has not been proved to be a fake, it has also not been proved to be genuine.

And while Ripperologists continue their hunt, it is clear that Jack the Ripper will be imprinted on the consciousness of the English-speaking world for many years to come.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/4042087.stm
Published: 2004/11/26 05:29:22 GMT© BBC MMIV

Of grail-shaped beacons

2004-11-26T07:10:00.000-07:00

The never-ending search
By Brendan O'Neill

Fascination with the Holy Grail has lasted for centuries, and now the Bletchley Park code-breakers have joined the hunt. But what is it that's made the grail the definition of something humans are always searching for but never actually finding?

Could an obscure inscription on a 250-year-old monument in a Staffordshire garden point the way to the Holy Grail - the jewelled chalice reportedly used by Jesus and his disciples at the Last Supper?

That is one theory entertained by Richard Kemp, the general manager of Lord Lichfield's Shugborough estate in Staffs.

Kemp has called in world-renowned code-breakers to try to decipher a cryptic message carved into the Shepherd's Monument on the Lichfield estate.

The monument, built around 1748, features an image of one of Nicholas Poussin's paintings, and beneath it the letters "D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M."

It has long been rumoured that these letters - which have baffled some of the greatest minds over the past 250 years, including Charles Darwin's and Josiah Wedgwood's - provide clues to the whereabouts of Christ's elusive cup.

Spot of bother

Poussin was said by some to have been a Grand Master of the Knights Templar, named after the order that captured Jerusalem during the Crusades and who were known as the "keepers of the Holy Grail".

Yet Oliver and Sheila Lawn, a couple in their 80s who were based at the code-breaking Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire during World War II, have had a spot of bother with the Shepherd's Monument.

Mr Lawn said yesterday that deciphering the letters was "much more difficult" than cracking the Enigma code in WWII. He thinks it's a message from an obscure Christian sect, declaring their belief that Jesus was an Earthly prophet, not a divinity - while his wife Sheila thinks it could be a coded tribute from a widowed earl to his wife.

So yet another trail to the Grail seems to have run dry. What is it about the Holy Grail that so excites the popular imagination? And why are so many willing to believe that such an item exists, when there is a dearth of evidence?

Renewed interest

The Holy Grail is believed by some to have been the chalice used at the Last Supper, by others to have been a cup used by Joseph of Arimathea to catch the blood of the crucified Christ, and by others still to have been both. Some claim that Joseph may have brought the cup to Britain in the first century CE.

Stories about the Grail have been told for centuries. There has been a renewed interest since the publication of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail in 1982, which claims, in a nutshell, that Jesus survived the crucifixion and together with Mary Magdalene founded a bloodline in France, the Merovingians, who were protected by the Knights Templar and later by the Freemasons. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, that book has been denounced as mad conspiracy-mongering by some.)

The probability that the cup found its ways to Joseph and that he travelled with it to Britain is as near as nil as makes no difference Eric Eve

The Holy Grail has even turned up in Hollywood. In Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the eponymous hero both fights off the Nazis and finds the Grail.

Now Ron Howard, the Happy Days actor turned film director, is making a big-screen version of The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown's novel about how clues in Da Vinci paintings could lead to the discovery of a religious mystery, including the Grail, and shake the foundations of Christianity.

Brown's novel has become a publishing phenomenon over the past two years, feted and hated in equal measure.

Purely legendary

According to experts, this is precisely where the Grail belongs - in fiction and films. Eric Eve is a tutor in theology and a New Testament scholar at Oxford University. He says he is unaware of any evidence for the existence of a Holy Grail.

"In the version of the legend I know, the Grail is meant to be the chalice Jesus used at the Last Supper, subsequently brought to England by Joseph of Arimathea. But there is no 1st Century evidence about what happened either to the chalice or to Joseph - assuming he's even an historical character.

"The probability that the cup found its ways to Joseph and that he travelled with it to Britain is as near as nil as makes no difference. I would say it is purely legendary."

Richard Barber, author of The Holy Grail: The History of a Legend, published by Penguin next month, says the Grail legend came into being more than a thousand years after Christ's death.

"It is pure literature. It was imagined by a French writer, Chretien de Troyes, at the end of the 12th Century, in the romance of Perceval. His vision is at the root of all the Grail stories."

Conspiracy theories

Barber believes that 20th Century fascination with the Grail stems from "the revival of interest in medieval literature in the 19th Century, when Tennyson, Wagner and the Pre-Raphaelite artists were all enthusiasts for the Grail legends" - and that our fascination today has been boosted by the contemporary penchant for conspiracy theories and cover-ups.

"The Grail - because it is mysterious and has always belonged in the realms of the imagination - is a marvellous focus for the new genre of 'imagined history', the idea that all history as taught and recorded is a vast cover-up. Once this kind of idea becomes current, particularly with the internet, it acquires a life of its own - regardless of whether it has any basis in reality.

Even some of those who have written of the Grail as having some "basis in reality" admit that it is difficult to say what the Grail is, never mind where it is.

Erling Haagensen is co-author (with Henry Lincoln) of The Templars' Secret Island: The Knights, The Priest and The Treasure, which claims that "something" is hidden on the tiny island of Bornholm in the Baltic Sea.

"I do not know what the Holy Grail is," says Haagensen. "Something very important and with strong connections to the Holy Grail is hidden on the island of Bornholm. The Ark of the Covenant might theoretically be hidden there.

"But there is something even more important, which always followed the Ark of the Covenant, and which we can now prove is found at Bornholm. This will be revealed in our coming book," he adds, mysteriously.

Yet while some authors - and a host of conspiracy websites - believe that "something" will one day be found, even men of the cloth have little faith in the existence of the Holy Grail.

"It's all good fun but absolute nonsense", says Richard Holloway, former Bishop of Edinburgh.

"The quest for the Holy Grail belongs with the quest for the ark Noah left on Mount Ararat or the fabled Ark of the Covenant Indiana Jones is always chasing. There ain't any objective truth in any of it - but of course it's a dream for publishers, who know the world is full of gullible people looking for miracles and they keep on promising that this time the miracle's going to come true.

"Only it isn't - but the money keeps rolling in."

Story from BBC NEWS
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/4044765.stm
Published: 2004/11/26 11:07:07 GMT© BBC MMIV

Dog nurses kittens

2004-11-26T07:05:00.000-07:00

This is so sweet! Not to mention heartbreaking, as well. And it just goes to show that, if more evidence were needed, animals are conscious creatures, capable of feeling loneliness and pain, capable of longing for children, capable of dreaming and hoping...

Dog Who Longed for Puppies Nurses Kittens
Tue Nov 23, 9:49 PM ET
EDWARDSBURG, Mich. - A Shih Tzu who, her owners say, longed for years to give birth — even to the point of going into false labor several times — finally is getting a chance to nurse some little ones: two stray kittens.

Owners Jean and Bill Schirf said the dog, named Geisha Girl, used to take a toy dog, wrap herself around it in her basket and mother it for a week or two.

Now she's doing the same thing with the kittens that Jean Schirf found two weeks ago in the woods behind her Cass County home just north of the Indiana border. The cats — a gray male and a gray-and-white female — appeared to be no more than 2 weeks old at the time, she said.

"She wraps herself around them all night long," Schirf told the South Bend (Ind.) Tribune for a story published Tuesday.

Not only did Geisha Girl start watching over and cleaning the kittens, which have been named Dilly and Dally, she started lactating within about a week — enough to provide them with some of the milk they need. Schirf helps out by bottle-feeding the cats 2 percent milk every four or five hours.

The dog, which the Schirfs bought from a pet store in 1991, never was spayed. She most recently went into heat about four to six weeks ago and never has been bred.

It's not unusual for such dogs to sometimes "have a false pregnancy and exhibit all the signs of being pregnant except for the fact of having puppies," said Dr. Michael Lampen, a veterinarian with the Bergman Animal Hospital in Cassopolis.

"They will come into milk and the whole bit. You have a dog with a false pregnancy and kittens who want a mother."

While the dog adores the kittens, the same cannot be said for the Schirfs' other pet cats, Demi Moore and Jasmine.

"They are jealous and sit back and watch them," Jean Schirf said.

She and her husband plan to find homes for the kittens after they are weaned from Geisha Girl.

Fine, Landon, be that way, see if we care :P

2004-11-23T17:49:00.000-07:00

Landon Donovan is leaving the M.L.S. to play for Germany. Poopy. That means both him and Michael Ballack will be playing for Germany. Double poopy. Which means, as I don't have cable, I will have to wait for the next World Cup to see Donovan play, and even then the broadcast will be in Spanish, which I do not speak. Triple poopy. I shall now go and pout...

Extreme Makeover Home Edition in my town!

2004-11-23T08:33:00.000-07:00

Well, the week has come to a close, and the camera crew has left town. My hometown of Arvada, Colorado, was fortunate enough to host the "Extreme Makeover Home Edition" show this week, and my daughters and I spent loads of time out at the site. We have pics of us with Eduardo Xol, the new guy, and my gawd does he smell good! He's, like, 7 feet tall and delicious! We also met Paul DiMeo, and got to hug him; met Constance Ramos, who is a darling; and met Tracey Hutson, who is a sweetie. The girls met Ty, and were able to get his autograph, so we're all sharing it. We had enough signatures from Eduardo, Constance, Tracey and Paul to be able to have one each.

It was freezing cold for most of the project, though the projected 9 inches of snow for Sunday's big reveal failed utterly to materialize, and the sun was warm and bright. The project is a duplex, sort of a homeless shelter but not really. It's a house where two families can stay until they're on their feet. The crew also built a neat little park called Renaissance Park, and a small rec center across the street (that was Ty's special project). Oh, and a basketball court, complete with murals, was dedicated by the official Denver Nuggets mascot.

All in all, it was a very moving experience. I had been sceptical, knowing full well the "magic of television", and so didn't really expect to see the design team actually working (when in fact they worked their asses off) or actually caring (when in fact Paul cried). What you see on the telly is how they really are, and they are amazing people. Ty was working three jobs simultaneously (here, one in Seattle, and one I don't know where) and so had very little time to press palms, but when he was able to come over to the crowd of onlookers he was unfailingly cheerful, upbeat, and kind.

Dolphins protect swimmers from shark

2004-11-23T08:29:00.000-07:00

This is neat! How can people think that animals aren't intelligent? And this shows not only intelligence--with more than a hint of abstract thinking--but it shows compassion as well. Pretty cool.

Dolphins Protect New Zealand Swimmers from Shark
Mon Nov 22, 9:52 PM ET
Science - Reuters

WELLINGTON (Reuters) - A pod of dolphins circled protectively round a group of New Zealand swimmers to fend off an attack by a great white shark, media reported on Tuesday.

Lifesavers Rob Howes, his 15-year-old daughter Niccy, Karina Cooper and Helen Slade were swimming 300 feet off Ocean Beach near Whangarei on New Zealand's North Island when the dolphins herded them -- apparently to protect them from a shark.

"They started to herd us up, they pushed all four of us together by doing tight circles around us," Howes told the New Zealand Press Association (NZPA).

Howes tried to drift away from the group, but two of the bigger dolphins herded him back just as he spotted a nine-foot great white shark swimming toward the group.

"I just recoiled. It was only about 2 m away from me, the water was crystal clear and it was as clear as the nose on my face," Howes said, referring to a distance of 6 feet.

"They had corralled us up to protect us," he said.

The lifesavers spent the next 40 minutes surrounded by the dolphins before they could safely swim back to shore. The incident happened on October 30, but the lifesavers kept the story to themselves until now.

Environment group Orca Research said dolphins attacked sharks to protect themselves and their young, so their actions in protecting the lifesavers was understandable.

"They could have sensed the danger to the swimmers and taken action to protect them," Orca's Ingrid Visser told NZPA.

Yahoo! News - Dolphins Protect New Zealand Swimmers from Shark

Vatican opens Inquisition archives

2004-11-22T09:04:00.000-07:00

Nov. 20, 2004, 6:55PM
Vatican opens its Inquisition archives for study
By PHILIP PULLELLA
Reuters News Service

CHURCH JUSTICE
• Beginning: Pope Gregory IX created the Inquisition in 1233 to curb heresy, but civil authorities took over prosecutions.
• Ending: It reached a peak in the 16th century to counter the Reformation.

VATICAN CITY - The Vatican is opening up more of its archives on the Inquisition as part of unprecedented study of the effect the Roman Catholic Church's attempt to control religious belief had on medieval and modern history.

The new project, announced last week, will see the Holy See cooperate with Italy's Culture Ministry and universities to catalogue thousands of documents about the Inquisition.

"Such a vast project has never been attempted before and it will be of great importance to respond to the new trends in international research of the control of religious ideas in medieval and modern Europe," a Vatican statement said.

Last week's Vatican statement said the project would catalogue documents concerning both the Roman Inquisition and the Spanish Inquisition.

The Vatican sponsored an academic symposium six years ago, and in 2000 Pope John Paul asked forgiveness "for errors committed in the service of truth through use of methods that had nothing to do with the Gospel."

One of the best-known victims was the astronomer Galileo, condemned for claiming Earth revolved around the sun. He was rehabilitated under John Paul in 1992.

But the new project appears aimed at studying what the pope has called "wounds to the collective memory" that remained open for centuries.

The Spanish Inquisition, founded in 1478, led to the expulsion of the country's Moors (Muslims) and Jews in 1492. It was one of Europe's most traumatic events.

Iris Chang and depression

2004-11-21T06:30:00.000-07:00

Deep, desperate depression can strike anyone, anywhere, at any time. I have suffered through raging bouts of it myself, first when my biography failed to find a publisher due to the machinations of my subject's family, second when members of my family began dying in droves. Perhaps that's one reason I continue to be troubled by the death of Iris Chang.

Author's depression so severe, son, 2, sent away

Only a few of those close to her knew she was severely depressed in the last few months.

But Chinese-American author Iris Chang, who was found dead in her car not far from her home in California last week, had become a changed person.

She had apparently shot herself.

The depression had got so bad that she and her husband decided to send their 2-year-old son, Christopher, to live with his paternal grandparents in Illinois.

To the outside world, the tall, striking Madam Chang, 36, seemed to be a woman in supreme control of her successful life.

She was a bestselling author and spokeswoman for a growing movement to seek compensations from Japan for World War II atrocities.

But Madam Chang was reportedly hospitalised recently after returning from Kentucky on a research trip for her latest book project.

'She was a wonderful person and she'll leave a huge void in everyone's life,' Mr Brett Douglas, her husband of 13 years, told the Mercury News.

Mr Douglas, a design engineer for Cisco Systems, declined to discuss specifics of her depression 'to respect the privacy of her family'.

He would only say that 'it's been really, really difficult.'

She had also asked her parents not to discuss her depression with others.

In April, she went on a 21-day, 28-city US tour to promote her latest book, The Chinese In America.

She would call every day to chat with Mr Douglas and their son.

But it was a gruelling schedule and took its toll on her, he said.

'She was never really the same after she got back.'

NO-ONE KNOWS

No-one knows 'what brought it on, but it developed suddenly and progressed rapidly,' said Susan Rabiner, her editor and literary agent.

'She had been in hospital, but she never really stabilised.'

She had gone to Ms Rabiner 'as a young kid' on the advice of a professor from Johns Hopkins University, where she had earned her masters degree in writing.

When Ms Rabiner learned that she spoke Mandarin, she asked her if she was interested in writing a book about Tsien Hsue-shen, an American space pioneer who was accused of being a communist and deported to China and went on to developed the Chinese missile programme.

The result was Thread Of The Silkworm, published in 1995.

Madam Chang's sudden death came as a blow to her colleagues in the Rape of Nanking Redress Coalition.

'We're pretty shaken up because we've lost someone who was for us the symbol of hope, the symbol of truth,' said Ms Julie Tang, co-chair of the group.

Ms Tang, a Superior Court judge in San Francisco, remembers her fierce resolve, her focus on fighting against injustice.

But at the same time, 'I've always felt that there was a kind of emotional fragility about Iris,' she said.

When she first read The Rape of Nanking, Madam Chang's bestselling book on Japanese atrocities in China in the 1930s, Ms Tang said she wondered: 'How can anybody endeavour to write about something so horrific and not be affected?'

But Ms Ami Chen Naim wrote in Metro, a Silicon Valley weekly newspaper that Madam Chang 'did not just see the Japanese army in China as evil, but recognised that evil is possible for all human beings'.

http://newpaper.asia1.com.sg/top/story/0,4136,77784,00.html

Simultaneous ceremonies for Iris Chang

2004-11-21T06:27:00.000-07:00

Mourners pay tribute to Rape of Nanking author
Sat Nov 20, 8:58 AM ET
Entertainment - AFP

LOS ALTOS, United States (AFP) - The acclaimed Chinese-American author Iris Chang was eulogized in simultaneous ceremonies in northern California, Washington and Nanjing, China, after her apparent suicide earlier this month.

The 36-year-old writer and journalist, who chronicled the rape and massacre of thousands of Chinese civilians by Japanese troops before World War II, was found shot dead in her car on November 9.

Family members said she suffered from depression and had been hospitalized for it.

Speakers at a ceremony prior to her burial here said her haunting bestseller, "The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II," may have contributed to the internal anguish that led to her death.

"She felt other people's suffering so intensely, to the point that it made her suffer," friend Barbara Masin said during the 75-minute memorial.

US Representative Michael Honda sent a representative to read a tribute that he presented in Congress earlier in the week.

"Her fierce pride of her Chinese-American heritage empowered others with the certainty that they were truly Americans despite their ancestry," the tribute said.

China's Vice Consul General Ciu Xuejun attended the burial along with hundreds of mourners, including Tim Yip, a 38-year-old fan.

"She helped me fill in the gaps about why my parents and their parents came to America," Yip said. "She helped me understand."

Chang was seen as a leading US non-fiction author and was widely known here and in Asia for her studies of Chinese immigrants and their descendents in the United States.

"The Chinese in America: A Narrative History," was published last year and traces more than 150 years of Asian American history.

But her best-known book was the 1997 "Rape of Nanking," which details the slaughter of Chinese civilians by the Imperial Japanese army that occupied China in the late 1930s.

It was the first major full-length English-language account of the atrocity and remained on the New York Times bestseller list for months.

Celestial soap opera

2004-11-21T06:09:00.000-07:00

God, I'm a geek...I find this kind of thing absolutely fascinating.

Imagine That! Star Patterns to Ponder
Fri Nov 19,11:29 AM ET
Science - Space.com
Joe Rao
SPACE.com Night Sky Columnist
SPACE.com

In our current evening sky we have one of the earliest soap-operalike stories, with two independent plots becoming intertwined into one. Perhaps we could call it the celestial version of "All My Children."

One of the key characters is Cassiopeia, the Queen, a zigzag row of bright stars. In terms of popularity, she probably ranks fourth among the star patterns behind the Big Dipper, Orion and the Pleiades. Certainly her shape is easy to remember: an irregular letter "M" or "W" formed by its five brightest stars, depending on how you look at it.

At this particular season, with Cassiopeia hovering high above Polaris, the North Star at around 9 p.m. local time, the "M" shape is most recognizable. When two fainter stars are added, the seven together outline Cassiopeia's chair or throne which was set close to the Pole of the sky.

Cassiopeia and Ursa Major (the Big Bear) appear to whirl around opposite to each other from Polaris. In the fall and early winter evenings when the Queen is high, the Bear appears to be hibernating near the northern horizon.

For many years I have looked at Cassiopeia's outline a bit differently than most of the standard astronomy texts and stargazing guides. To me, she resembles not an "M" or "W" nor a chair or a throne, but rather the Queen's face in profile.

The face is best viewed as soon as it gets completely dark, about 90 minutes after local sundown, with Cassiopeia standing high in the northeast sky.

The zigzag row of five bright stars would mark the outline of the Queen's crown. The bright star, Schedir would be the Queen's eye, while a nearby fainter fourth-magnitude star, Zeta, would mark her nose. Finally, a fifth magnitude star, Theta, not usually plotted on most popular star charts of this region of the sky, marks the Queen's chin.

You could even embellish this scene a bit by pretending that the faint stars Kappa, 48 and 50 Cassiopeiae compose the Queen's scepter, hovering just above the Queen's head.

It wouldn't be the first time, incidentally, that a star pattern referred to as a scepter has been placed in this part of the sky. Not too far from Cassiopeia is a group of stars that once supposedly formed the obsolete constellation of the Scepter and the Hand of Justice, created by Augustin Royer in 1679. Today, those stars officially belong to the constellation of Lacerta, the Lizard, named in 1687 by the astronomer Johannes Hevelius. It is a small constellation, with no bright stars, but just imagine going from a regal implement to a lowly lizard in the span of just eight years!

Cassiopeia's husband was Cepheus, the King of Ethiopia, who during early November evenings seems upside-down. Rather than a king, he seems to resemble a church with a steeple or perhaps an Alpine ski lodge with a steep, snow-shedding roof.

In our celestial soap opera, Cassiopeia had offended the sea god Neptune by boasting that her beauty rivaled that of the Nereides (sea nymphs).

Since the Nereides were goddesses and disliked being compared to a mere mortal princess, so they complained directly to Neptune. Neptune in turn, answered Cassiopeia's boasts by flooding the seacoast and sending a vicious sea monster (Cetus, sometimes also called the Whale) to ravage the land. Nobody was able to fight the monster, and there seemed to be no way to get rid of him.

To save Ethiopia, Cepheus followed the advice of the oracle of Ammon in Libya and chained his daughter, the princess Andromeda (now overhead) on the rocky shore as a sacrifice. So Andromeda was chained to a rock by the sea and left to her fate. Presently, Cetus emerged from the waves to swallow her.

As Cetus approached, however, Perseus, the Hero appeared on the Winged Horse, Pegasus. Perseus was returning from a mission to slay the Gorgon Medusa, who had snakes for hair and whose hideous gaze turned the viewer to stone. Perseus removed her severed head from his pouch and held it front of Cetus, petrifying him. So Andromeda was saved and became betrothed on the spot to Perseus. Then the two went off into the sunset on Pegasus and presumably lived happily ever after.

This all supposedly happened thousands of years ago, but on chilly November evenings you can see them all in the sky as constellations: the King, the Queen, the Princess, the Hero, the Flying Horse and the Sea Monster. They're all in the same region of the sky, and when Cassiopeia is high up, all the other characters in our soap opera can be seen as well.

Basic Sky Guides
Full Moon Fever
Astrophotography 101
Sky Calendar & Moon Phases
10 Steps to Rewarding Stargazing
Understanding the Ecliptic and the Zodiac
False Dawn: All about the Zodiacal Light
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Joe Rao serves as an instructor and guest lecturer at New York's Hayden Planetarium. He writes about astronomy for The New York Times and other publications, and he is also an on-camera meteorologist for News 12 Westchester, New York

Ancestor of apes and humans found

2004-11-21T05:59:00.000-07:00

This has certainly been a banner year for anthropological finds!

'Original' great ape discovered
By Paul Rincon BBC News science reporter

Scientists have unearthed remains of a primate that could have been ancestral not only to humans but to all great apes, including chimps and gorillas.

The partial skeleton of this 13-million-year-old "missing link" was found by palaeontologists working at a dig site near Barcelona in Spain.

Details of the sensational discovery appear in Science magazine.

The new specimen was probably male, a fruit-eater and was slightly smaller than a chimpanzee, researchers say.

Palaeontologists were just getting started at the dig when a bulldozer churned up a tooth.

Further investigation yielded one of the most complete ape skeletons known from the Miocene Epoch (about 22 to 5.5 million years ago).

Salvador Moyà-Solà of the Miquel Crusafont Institute of Palaeontology in Barcelona and colleagues subsequently found parts of the skull, ribcage, spine, hands and feet, along with other bones.

They have assigned it to an entirely new family and species: Pierolapithecus catalaunicus.

Monkey business

Great apes are thought - on the basis of genetic and other evidence - to have separated from another primate group known as the lesser apes some time between 11 and 16 million years ago (The lesser apes include gibbons and siamang).

It is fascinating, therefore, for a specimen like Pierolapithecus to turn up right in this window.

Scientists think the creature lived after the lesser apes went their own evolutionary way, but before the great apes began their own diversification into different forms such as orang-utans, gorillas, chimps and, of course, humans.

"Pierolapithecus probably is, or is very close to, the last common ancestor of great apes and humans," said Professor Moyà-Solà.

The new ape's ribcage, lower spine and wrist display signs of specialised climbing abilities that link it with modern great apes, say the researchers.

The overall orthograde - or upright - body design of this animal and modern-day great apes is thought to be an adaptation to vertical climbing and suspending the body from branches.

The Miocene ape fossil record is patchy; so finding such a complete fossil from this time period is unprecedented.

"It's very impressive because of its completeness," David Begun, professor of palaeoanthropology at the University of Toronto, Canada, told the BBC News website.

"I think the authors are right that it fills a gap between the first apes to arrive in Europe and the fossil apes that more closely resemble those living today."

Planet of the apes

Other scientists working on fossil apes were delighted by the discovery. But not all were convinced by the conclusions drawn by the Spanish researchers.

Professor Begun considers it unlikely that Pierolapithecus was ancestral to orang-utans.

"I haven't seen the original fossils. But there are four or five important features of the face, in particular, that seem to be closer to African apes," he explained.

"To me the possibility exists that it is already on the evolutionary line to African apes and humans."

Professor David Pilbeam, director of the Peadbody Museum in Cambridge, US, was even more sceptical about the relationship of Pierolapithecus to modern great apes: "To me it's a very long stretch to link this to any of the living apes," he told the BBC News website.

"I think it's unlikely that you would find relatives of the apes that live today in equatorial Africa and Asia up in Europe.

"But it's interesting in that it appears to show some adaptations towards having a trunk that's upright because it's suspending itself [from branches].

"It also has some features that show quadrupedal (four-legged) behaviour. Not quadrupedal in the way chimps or gorillas are, but more in the way that monkeys are - putting their fingers down flat," he explained.

During the Miocene, Earth really was the planet of the apes.

As many as 100 different ape species roamed the Old World, from France to China in Eurasia and from Kenya to Namibia in Africa.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4014351.stm

Iris Chang

2004-11-19T08:04:00.000-07:00

This is an article written by a friend of Iris Chang, the amazing historian who committed suicide last week...

Posted on Mon, Nov. 15, 2004
Iris Chang's death robs the world of a courageous geniusBy Jeff GuinnStar-Telegram Books Editor

At 36, my friend Iris Chang was acknowledged as one of America's best young historians. She had written three books, including the controversial The Rape of Nanking, a national bestseller in 1999. She had a husband and a 2-year-old son. She was brilliant, breathtakingly beautiful and young enough to have her best years ahead as a human being and as a writer. She apparently killed herself last Tuesday morning with a gunshot to the head.

Iris' death is a terrible loss -- to her family most of all, but also to those who want and need to know about some of the most inconvenient parts of history, the iniquities and outright atrocities that too often are deliberately forgotten. Fourteen months ago in Fort Worth, she alternately charmed and shocked an audience at Scott Theatre as she explained why she chose to write about massacres (Nanking) and long-term, ongoing racial discrimination (The Chinese in America).

"I try to tell the stories that many people will neglect or ignore," Iris said. "I've always felt that in every writer there is something that dictates the theme of what she writes. For me, that's injustice."

She told those stories effectively. Shortly before his own death, the author Stephen Ambrose called Iris "maybe the best young historian we've got, because she understands that to communicate history, you've got to tell the story in an interesting way."

Because her books generated so much controversy, it was inevitable she would have detractors, too. Since The Rape of Nanking's publication, some have claimed it was written as anti-Japanese propaganda or that its description of atrocities committed during the city's occupation in 1937 were exaggerated. Yet she never backed down. Politely, firmly, she defended her research and conclusions. On one occasion, she appeared on The News Hour With Jim Lehrer with the Japanese ambassador to the United States and stated that the Japanese government had never apologized for its country's crimes in Nanking. The ambassador responded that perhaps there had been "unfortunate incidents." Iris' reply was, " 'Unfortunate incidents'? Did you hear an apology? I didn't."

Yet there was an immense softness to her as well, a genuine empathy for others. If she felt sweeping indignation for the actions of some, she felt equally intense pain for the suffering of victims, and I believe this is what eventually caused her to take her own life. We talked about this quite often, a few times in person, more often by phone or e-mail. She would discuss her most recent research efforts -- lately, she was preparing a book on Japanese mistreatment of war prisoners in the Bataan Peninsula -- and she never seemed quite able to adopt a scholar's emotional distance from her subjects. Apparently, at some point a few months ago on a research trip, the agony she felt for all those whose sufferings she chronicled finally caught up with her.

She returned home to California, was treated for depression and never really recovered. Her suicide note asked that she be remembered as she was before her illness.

Iris Chang was a genius, the most brilliant intellect I have ever encountered. The advantage of genius is the ability to know and feel things to a greater degree than everyone else. But that's the penalty of genius, too. You lose the ability to compartmentalize, to put harmful things out of your mind, at least for a little while. I'm certain Iris was finally overwhelmed by the sadness she couldn't stop feeling for victims whose stories she didn't want forgotten.

Because of her, they won't be.

Jeff Guinn, (817) 390-7720
jguinn@star-telegram.com

http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/10172940.htm

Lost treasures of Afghanistan being recovered

2004-11-19T07:40:00.000-07:00

Afghanistan's 'Lost' Heritage Found in Musty Boxes
Wed Nov 17, 2:33 PM ET
Science - Reuters
By Sue Pleming

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - More than 22,000 ancient cultural treasures from Afghanistan, feared lost or destroyed after decades of war and Taliban rule, have been taken out of dusty crates and safes in Kabul and inventoried for safekeeping, said a U.S. archeologist on Wednesday.

The objects, including 2,500 years' worth of gold and silver coins and ancient sculptures, represent a "Silk Road" of goods once traded from China, India, Egypt, Greece, Rome and ancient Afghanistan.

"By the end of the Taliban's reign, most of us thought there was nothing left, just destruction and despair," said National Geographic fellow and archeologist Fred Hiebert, who led an inventory project of the items.

Many of the treasures were once on display in the Kabul Museum, which was shelled several times and lost its roof and door. Inventory cards were lost by fire and neglect, making it difficult to track down any of the items.

"This project has been an enormous boost for Afghanistan - finding the treasures intact and then working with the outstanding team to inventory each one of them, preserving our heritage for our children," said Afghanistan's minister of information and culture, Sayed Makhdoom Raheen, in a statement released by National Geographic.

Hiebert told reporters in a conference call he hoped the detailed inventory would make it easier for international law enforcement groups to track down precious items still missing.

Some looted artifacts have turned up in recent years at auction houses in Tokyo, London and New York, and Hiebert hopes these can be returned to Afghanistan.

DUSTY BOXES

The bulk of the newly inventoried items were found in April 2003 when a presidential palace vault in Kabul was cracked open to reveal a trove of famed, in tact Bactrian gold pieces.

But many more artifacts, including giant Buddhist sculptures and ancient ivory statues, have been found in recent months in unmarked boxes and safes stashed for safekeeping during the Soviet-led coup and then during the years of hardline Taliban rule.

After doing a first inventory of the Bactrian gold pieces, Hiebert was surprised when he was asked to look at 20 other boxes found to contain precious objects that Silk Road camels once carried between China and Rome and elsewhere.

"I looked at the eyes of the museum curators who had not seen these (artifacts) for 25 years and it was a very emotional experience. They saw their own heritage coming to life," he said.

Later, more trunks of precious artifacts were found in another location, which Hiebert declined to name because of security concerns.

Fearing they would find only objects smashed by the Taliban which had destroyed many pre-Islamic objects, these trunks were filled with hundreds and hundreds of sculptures and carvings from Buddhist religious structures, Hiebert said.

None of the newly uncovered items is yet on display in Afghanistan, mostly due to security concerns but also because a suitable exhibit space has not been found yet.

The old Kabul Museum is on the edge of the city and Hiebert says there are hopes a new museum will be built in a central location. One option is to stage an international tour of these objects until a new museum space is built.

Yahoo! News - Afghanistan's 'Lost' Heritage Found in Musty Boxes

Rethinking ancient history

2004-11-19T05:22:00.000-07:00

Fire Pit Dated to Be Over 50,000 Years Old
Thu Nov 18,10:10 AM ET
Science - AP
By AMY GEIER EDGAR, Associated Press Writer

COLUMBIA, S.C. - In the growing debate about when people first appeared on this continent, a leading archaeologist said Wednesday he has discovered what could be sooty evidence of human occupation in North America tens of thousands of years earlier than is commonly believed.

University of South Carolina archaeologist Al Goodyear said he has uncovered a layer of charcoal from a possible hearth or fire pit at a site near the Savannah River.

Samples from the layer have been laboratory-dated to more than 50,000 years old. Yet Goodyear stopped short of declaring it proof of the continent's earliest human occupation.

"It does look like a hearth," he said, "and the material that was dated has been burned."

Since the 1960s, anthropologists have generally accepted that hunters migrated to North America about 13,000 years ago over a land bridge into Alaska following the retreat of Ice Age glaciers.

But other sites, including the Topper dig in South Carolina, have yielded rough stone tools and other artifacts suggesting that humans lived in North America thousands of years earlier when the climate was much colder. While there is no ironclad proof that an older culture existed, scientists are increasingly open to the idea that humans arrived from many other directions besides the northwest, perhaps even sailing across oceans.

But a 50,000-year-old fire pit would scorch the prevailing occupation theory.

Goodyear's evidence was examined by other scientists, who performed radiocarbon tests on samples to determine their age. However, he made his initial case for the fire pit Wednesday in a news conference rather publishing data in a scientific journal edited by other researchers.

Goodyear, who has worked the Topper site since 1981, discovered the charcoal layer in May.
Thomas Stafford, director of Stafford Laboratories in Boulder, Colo., then took samples of the substance for tests at the University of California at Irvine.

The results showed that wood varieties — oak, pine, red cherry and buckeye — had been burned in a low-temperature fire at least 50,300 years ago, he said.

Stafford described the burnt layer as measuring 2 or 3 inches thick and about 2 feet wide.
Rather than a simple black band in the soil, Stafford said the layer had the "shape of a very shallow plate."

He said it could have been the result of a fire tended by humans, or the ashes could have been deposited by wind, rain or flooding.

Other researchers were more skeptical of Goodyear's discovery, noting that previous claims of very old occupation at other sites never have been verified.

"We still need to be cautious," said Vanderbilt University anthropologist Tom Dillehay. "I would not yet rewrite the books. The find is very significant and shows that there is much we don't understand and can't easily reject or accept."

Other scientists were blunter.

"I think it's a 50,000-year-old geologic deposit," said University of Texas archaeologist Mike Collins. "It has almost nothing to do with the story of the peopling of North America."

Modern humans are believed to have emerged from Africa 100,000 years ago and spread around the world, elbowing out less capable human cousins like Homo erectus and Neanderthals.

Yahoo! News - Fire Pit Dated to Be Over 50,000 Years Old

Everest

2004-11-17T04:54:00.000-07:00

Everest is in danger of being affected by global warming. I wrote a biography of one of the victims of this mountain, a man called Andrew Irvine, a biography which was never published thanks in large part to Andrew Irvine's family, but this mountain still haunts me...

Climate change 'ruining' Everest
Campaigners demand urgent assessment of the risks to Everest

Environmentalists are calling for Mount Everest to be put on a UN danger list because of global warming.

Melting glaciers have swollen lakes and increased the risk of catastrophic flooding in the Himalayas, they say.

The move to save the world's highest peak is part of a new campaign to force reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide.

The campaigners are arguing that countries are legally bound to protect World Heritage Sites from damage.

The group, including famous mountaineers and members of the UK-based group Friends of the Earth, will ask Unesco, the UN educational, scientific and cultural agency to put Nepal's Sagarmatha National Park on its danger list.

Unesco must shout out loudly and say we need greenhouse gas emission cuts - legally
Peter RoderickClimate Justice group It will also submit petitions for the Belize barrier reef and the Huascaran National Park in Peru to be included in the list.

"Mount Everest is a powerful symbol of the natural world not just in Nepal," the director of Friends of the Earth Nepal, Prakash Sharma, was quoted as saying by Reuters news agency.

"If this mountain is threatened by climate change, then we know the situation is deadly serious," the director added.

The campaigners admit that their initiative is a largely symbolic act, the BBC's environment correspondent Richard Black says.

But they argue that if politics is failing to curb global warming, then other avenues - including the law - must be used, our correspondent says.

If Unesco agrees with the submissions, it can ask member states to take corrective action.

However, even if Unesco does demand emission cuts, there is nothing in its rules which would force governments to obey, our correspondent adds.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/4018261.stm

Awesome

2004-11-16T09:36:00.000-07:00

Italy Prepares to Return Prized Ethiopian Obelisk
World - Reuters
By Shasta Darlington

ROME (Reuters) - Italy finally looks set to heal a feud with Ethiopia by returning one of its most cherished relics, the obelisk of Axum, taken by fascist invaders almost 70 years ago.

Final details of a plan to transport the 200-tongranite column from Rome to the holy city of Axum are expected to be discussed when Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi meets Italian officials on Thursday and Friday.

Ethiopia has had to build an airstrip to receive the obelisk, the most important symbol of the dawn of Ethiopian civilization, and a road to take it to a pit in the center of town.

"Talks are in the final phase, there are just a few things to check, like whether the road is ready," an Italian government source said.

Government and diplomatic sources said the obelisk could be loaded on to an airplane before Christmas and at the very latest before the Ethiopian rainy season starts in April.

Asked about the road and airstrip, Eshetu Yisma, at the embassy in Rome, said: "From the Ethiopian side everything is ready. They are just agreeing on details on both sides."

But after more than half a century of promises, Ethiopians can be forgiven for being skeptical.
The 24-meter obelisk, believed to be at least 2,000 years old, was split into three and hauled off when fascist Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1937.

After the fall of the dictator Benito Mussolini and his nascent Italian "empire," Rome signed an accord in 1947 agreeing to return stolen relics and art works to Ethiopia.

Another accord was signed in 1956 and another in 1997, but the obelisk with its geometric designs remained in Rome, in front of what had been the Ministry of Italian Africa.

Two years ago, Ethiopia threatened to sever diplomatic ties, eliciting a fresh pledge.

Nature also gave a helping hand. Lightning damaged the obelisk in the same year, spurring Italian authorities to begin dismantling the column.

However, logistical obstacles have delayed its return.

Italy had removed the monument by ship, but the only convenient port now lies in Eritrea, unfriendly to Ethiopia.

So authorities have had to build the airstrip and road, and find an airplane that can handle the obelisk, whose heaviest section weighs over 80 tonnes.

A national holiday has been promised for the day it is finally returned home.

"Until the obelisk is returned to Ethiopia, Mussolini will be laughing at us from his grave," said Richard Pankhurst, a British historian living in Addis Ababa who has led the demands for the return of Ethiopian treasures.

(Additional reporting by Tsegaye Tadesse in Addis Ababa)

Atlantis found?

2004-11-15T08:47:00.000-07:00

U.S. Researcher Says Finds Atlantis Off Cyprus
Sun Nov 14,11:35 AM ET
Science - Reuters
By Michele Kambas

LIMASSOL, Cyprus (Reuters) - A U.S. researcher on Sunday claimed he had found the lost civilization of Atlantis in the watery deep off Cyprus -- adding his theory to a mystery which has baffled explorers for centuries.

Robert Sarmast says a Mediterranean basin was flooded in a deluge around 9,000 BC which submerged a rectangular land mass he believes was Atlantis, lying about 1 mile beneath sea level between Cyprus and Syria.

"We have definitely found it," said Sarmast, who led a team of explorers 50 miles off the south-east coast of Cyprus earlier this month.

Deep water sonar scanning had indicated man-made structures on a submerged hill, including a 3-kilometer-long wall, a walled hill summit and deep trenches, he said. But further explorations were needed, he added.

"We cannot yet provide tangible proof in the form of bricks and mortar as the artifacts are still buried under several meters of sediment, but the circumstantial and other evidence is irrefutable," he claimed.

At a news conference in the port city of Limassol, Sarmast provided only animated simulations of the "hill."

Whether and where Atlantis existed has captured imaginations for centuries.

According to ancient Greek philosopher Plato, Atlantis was an island nation where an advanced civilization developed some 11,500 years ago.

Theories abound as to why it disappeared, from Atlantis being hit by a cataclysmic natural disaster to Greek mythology which describes the civilization as being so corrupted by greed and power that it was destroyed by God.

Skeptics believe Atlantis was a figment of Plato's imagination.

Sarmast says he was led to Cyprus by clues in Plato's dialogues. Plato's reference to Atlantis lying opposite the Pillars of Hercules -- believed to be the Straits of Gibraltar -- have often led explorers to focus on either the Atlantic Ocean, Ireland or the Azores off Portugal.

"People who dismiss this have not really done their homework, skeptics don't really understand.

To understand the enigma of Atlantis you have to have good knowledge of ancient history, Biblical references, the Sumerian culture and their tablets and so on," said Sarmast.

Although the most prevailing story of a world cataclysm is listed in the Biblical Old Testament, several ancient cultures do list accounts of civilizations being destroyed in floods.

Probing a Pharaoh

2004-11-15T08:42:00.000-07:00

Egypt Hopes to Solve Riddle of Tutankhamun Death
Sat Nov 13, 5:41 PM ET
Science - Reuters
By Tom Perry

CAIRO (Reuters) - Egypt plans to X-ray the mummy of Tutankhamun to find out what killed the king who ruled Egypt more than 3,000 years ago and died while only a teen-ager.

Archaeologists will move Tutankhamun's body from its tomb, which was discovered packed with treasure in 1922, to Cairo for tests which should resolve the mystery over whether he died naturally or was murdered.

"We will know about any diseases he had, any kind of injuries and his real age," Egyptian antiquities chief Zahi Hawass told Reuters. "We will know the answer to whether he died normally or was he killed."

The mummy would be moved by the end of November and the CAT scan, which will produce a three-dimensional X-ray of his remains, completed by the end of the year, he said.

Tutankhamun's treasures, including a stunning gold mask which covered the head of his mummy, were removed from the tomb in Luxor's Valley of the Kings by British archaeologist Howard Carter. They are usually on show in the Cairo Museum.

But his mummified remains were left in the tomb in a stone coffin. Archaeologists last opened the coffin in 1968, when an X-ray revealed a chip of bone in his skull.

That fueled speculation that a blow to the head had killed the king, whose high priest and army commander have been singled out as chief suspects.

"No one has seen the mummy since 1968," Hawass said.

The three-dimensional X-ray of what appears to be a fracture would show whether it had been caused by a blow to the head, said Brando Quilici, a film maker with National Geographic, which is partly sponsoring the research.

Hawass said Tutankhamun's mummy had largely been smashed to pieces by Carter's expedition, when tools were used to remove the king's gold mask from his body. The mask had been firmly attached to the mummy by resin, he said.

But that would not hinder the research.

"Even if it just bone, we can examine each bone," he said.

Hawass said he would like Tutankhamun's mummy to go back to its tomb after the completion of the research.

Mystery has surrounded Tutankhamun since the discovery of his tomb. Lord Carnarvon, Carter's sponsor and among the first to enter the tomb, died shortly afterward from an infected mosquito bite.

Newspapers at the time said Carter had unleashed a Pharaonic curse which killed Carnarvon and others linked to the discovery.

Scientists have in the past suggested that a disease lying dormant in the tomb may have killed the British aristocrat.

Hysterical!

2004-11-15T08:40:00.000-07:00

This is from the AP via Yahoo (and just in time, too--I needed a giggle!):

Beavers Make Dam Out of Stolen Money
Top Stories - AP

GREENSBURG, La. - Beavers found a bag of bills stolen from a casino, tore it open and wove the money into the sticks and brush of their dam on a creek near Baton Rouge.

"They hadn't torn the bills up. They were still whole," said Maj. Michael Martin of the East Feliciana Parish Sheriff's Office.

The money was part of at least $70,000 taken last week from the Lucky Dollar Casino in Greensburg, about 30 miles northeast of Baton Rouge.

Sheriff's deputies in St. Helena Parish, where the truck stop video poker casino is located, have accused a security guard at the casino of disabling its security cameras. Jacqueline Wall, 25, was booked with felony theft, Martin said.

She told investigators a ski-masked gunman made her help him empty all the casino's safes, then kidnapped her, knocked her out and left her in an uninhabited area in East Feliciana Parish.

Deputies had searched for the money for days before an attorney called with a tip: the money had been thrown into the creek. The attorney's client hopes to make a deal with prosecutors, Greensburg Police Chief Ronald Harrell said.

They found one money bag right away. The second was downstream, against the beaver dam.
After trying unsuccessfully to find the third bag in the deep water near the dam, Martin said, deputies began to break it down to release some of the water so they could search in a shallower pool.

That was when they saw the dam's expensive decoration.

He said they eventually found the third sack, which still had some money left in it.

"The casino people were elated" to get the money back, even if some of it was wet, Harrell said.
Deputies found about $40,000, and expected to find the rest in a safety deposit box at a bank in
Mississippi.

Of cabbages and kings

2004-11-12T09:43:00.000-07:00

Chandira posted a thingy on Thrace, which set me to thinking of the ancient Mediterranean in general, which led of course to King Arthur. Makes sense, no? I'd seen a program on King Arthur and his possible non-Britannic origins, and for some reason Chandira's post reminded me of that program. I googled King Arthur and came up with Scythia, not Thrace.

Anyway, to make a long story short, there are connections between the Scythians and the Hungarians, so I very well may have one tiny drop of Scythian blood in me too, which is supremely cool.

I love genealogy, and love research, and worship history itself ;) so all of this is just plain fun, on a dark and dreary day when I desperately need something fun...

Cosmos-1

2004-11-12T08:30:00.000-07:00

This is from BBC NEWS Science/Nature Solar sail craft gets launch date

Solar sail craft gets launch date

The spacecraft uses photons from the Sun to propel itThe world's first spacecraft to use a solar sail for propulsion is set to be launched from a submerged Russian submarine on 1 March next year.

Cosmos-1 has been built by space advocacy group The Planetary Society and will deploy eight triangular sail blades once it is in space.

Photons from sunlight will push on the spacecraft sails to propel it on the first controlled solar sail flight.

Some hope solar sails will one day help humans travel to the stars.

The US, European, Japanese and Russian space agencies also have solar sail programmes in the offing.

The entire spacecraft has reportedly been completed for under $4m (£2.1m).

Missile launch

Cosmos-1 will be launched into space aboard a modified Volna intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) from a submarine in the Barents Sea. Typically, the Volna does not have enough thrust to reach orbit.

But the missile used for Cosmos-1 will have an added rocket engine (kick stage) of a type used to de-orbit satellites.

The kick-stage engine will provide the additional thrust required to get Cosmos-1 into orbit.
Although 1 March is slated as the earliest date for a launch attempt, the mission has a launch period extending from 1 March to 7 April 2005. Ultimately, the launch date will be determined by the Russian Navy.

A Russian Navy missile has been modified to launch Cosmos-1

"This whole venture is audacious and risky," said Bruce Murray, co-founder of The Planetary Society with astronomer Carl Sagan and space scientist Louis Friedman.

"It is a testament to the inspiring nature of space exploration and to the desire of people everywhere to be part of the adventure of great projects."

Solar sails reflect light particles, or photons, from the Sun, gaining momentum in the opposite direction to propel spacecraft forward.

Several days to perhaps a week of checkout is likely - to make sure the spacecraft systems are in good health - before the blades are positioned. The controlled flight might then occur in the second week after launch.

Because solar sails continue accelerating, they could reach distant targets in amazing times.
Sunlight would become too weak beyond the realms of Jupiter but one theory for interstellar travel is to direct lasers at the sails.

Paging Fox Mulder...Paging Fox Mulder...

2004-11-05T14:06:00.000-07:00

Now this is cool, rational explanation or not!

Updated: 03:08 PM EST
Mars Rovers Get Mystery Power Boost
By JOHN ANTCZAK, AP

LOS ANGELES (Nov. 4) - As NASA's Mars rovers keep rolling past all expectations of their useful lives, scientists have a happy mystery: For some reason one of the vehicles has actually gained power recently.

Opportunity recently experienced an unexplained rejuvenation from what can so far be described only as two or three significant "cleaning events," said Jim Erickson, the rover project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

"Now we're assuming they're cleaning, but all we can really say is that overnight the solar panels produced between 2 and 5 percent additional power immediately," he said.

"We're surmising that for some reason dust is being removed from the solar panel and that's increasing the efficiency of the sunlight being converted to electricity."

The rover team has been bandying about theories, but hasn't figured out the cause.

"One favorite is that a dust devil happened to pick the vehicle to go through and go over the surface of it and clean it off a little bit," Erickson said.

Opportunity and its twin, Spirit, parachuted to opposite sides of Mars back in January, but they remain in good shape after enduring the worst of the Martian winter, which cut down on the amount of energy reaching their solar panels.

Both six-wheeled rovers have discovered geologic evidence of past water activity on the Red Planet and are continuing to send valuable data.

"We are pushing these vehicles to their very limits," said Steve Squyres, the rover principal investigator from Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. "In many ways they are performing better in some sense just because we've gotten better at operating them and we are in this much more challenging and geologically rich terrain."

Spirit has had several minor problems, indicating that various parts may be showing their age, Erickson said.

Spirit, having trekked nearly two miles across the flat terrain of the vast Gusev Crater region where it set down, is zigzagging up the rugged Columbia Hills and is now nearly 200 feet above the surrounding plain.

The intriguing layered rocks of the hills are much different than the plain below, and scientists are working on multiple hypotheses to explain how they formed.

The leading theory is that the rocks began as volcanic ash that fell out of the sky or moved along the ground in ash flows, and minerals inside them were subsequently altered by ground water, said Ray Arvidson, the rover deputy principal investigator from Washington University in St. Louis, Mo.

Opportunity is nearing the end of its exploration of stadium-size Endurance Crater in the Meridiani Planum region and may claw its way over the rim.

The rovers had available about 1,000 watt-hours a day when they arrived on Mars, but dust on their solar panels and the seasonal decrease in solar energy have limited their power, and therefore their activities.

Opportunity is now at about 820 watt-hours and remains very close to full capability. Spirit, which is in a less advantageous position to point its arrays toward the sun, has 350 to 400 watt-hours daily.

11/04/04 23:16 EST
http://aolsvc.news.aol.com/news/article.adp?id=20041104231809990004

More on the Day of the Dead

2004-11-03T07:24:00.000-07:00

From the Houston Chronicle:

HoustonChronicle.com -- http://www.HoustonChronicle.com Section: Editorial

Nov. 1, 2004, 1:33AM

DAY OF THE DEAD

Rites to celebrate transition have affirmed life and strengthened cultures over centuries.
Copyright 2004 Houston Chronicle

Tomorrow's date, Nov. 2, has been momentous in these parts for years — more than 500 years, in fact. Long before the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November became America's day to choose its leaders, Nov. 2 marked the profound, joyous and complex Day of the Dead, a holiday so resonant it still inspires yearly festivals, observances and artworks.

For Mexicans, El Dia De Los Muertos is a multilayered holiday honoring dead loved ones. Spanish conquistadors and their priests gave the New World All Soul's Day, a solemn Catholic holiday when dead souls are thought to walk the earth. But they never neutralized the coinciding Aztec rite — which celebrated death, the cyclical nature of life, and the fleeting chance to interact with beings from another world.

To welcome their dead loved ones home, families today craft brilliant altars adorned with loved ones' photographs. The offerings include marigolds; favorite drinks and snacks of the deceased; candles; and floating tissue paper banners. On Nov. 2, relatives troop to the graveyard to clean and decorate the family graves, pausing after their labor to pray, picnic and toast the honored dead.

In Anglo culture, the corresponding celebration is Halloween, a prank-filled, slightly anxious holiday. But for Mexicans, this yearly ghost-return is full of cheer and contemplation. It allows families to celebrate their ongoing bond with dead loved ones. And on a deeper level, it represents a portal. El Dia de Los Muertos is the one day when the wall between two worlds foreign to one another is breached. Death, rather than being alien and menacing, simply is another country to which mortals can periodically gain access. The contact gives them strength and helps to banish helplessness and fear.

A few of the same feelings color Americans' own observance of Election Day, which this year falls on Nov. 2. Election Day also provides a portal: Once every four years, it gives ordinary people direct access to the most remote regions of power. The contact is welcome, solemn and, above all, vital to both sides. Like the Aztec holiday, Nov. 2 reminds and reassures Americans that transition is a part of life. To embrace it properly, all one needs to do is vote.

El Dia de los Muertos

2004-11-03T07:19:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was the Day of the Dead in Mexico. An intensely interesting thing, this Day of the Dead, with its celebrations and its sugar skulls...The article below is from Yahoo via Reuters. I have often wished very badly that I could participate in this Day, with its celebrations.

Cheering the Day of the Dead with Food, Flowers

Tue Nov 2, 8:33 AM ET

By Tim Gaynor

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico (Reuters) - From indigenous Indian villages to violence-torn cities on the U.S. border, millions of Mexicans trekked to cemeteries on Monday to honor their dead with flowers, food and musical tributes.

The two-day celebration has its roots in Roman Catholic tradition and ancient pagan rites where families honor dead relatives by cleaning their graves, offering them favorite food, laying out flowers and even serenading them with the music they used to love.

Drawing on a belief of the Tarascan people in central Mexico that departed souls can be lured back, the celebration begins on Nov. 1 with the Day of the Innocents to honor departed children while the Day of the Dead on Nov. 2, coinciding with All Souls' Day, is to remember adults.

The tradition is one of the most colorful and deep-rooted in Mexico and celebrated by factory workers in boomtowns along the U.S. border, urban professionals in the capital and among traditional Mayan communities in the tropical south.

"It's a happy occasion because you're remembering someone beloved," barman Alfredo Rodriguez said in Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, Texas.

The party mood inside cemeteries amounts to a celebration of death, even in Ciudad Juarez, where a horrific 11-year killing spree has claimed the lives of well over 300 women.

Those murders, the failure of authorities to catch the killers and vicious turf wars between rival drug gangs have seen Ciudad Juarez dubbed "The City of the Dead."

MOCK AND EMBRACE DEATH

But Mexicans both mock and embrace death in these annual celebrations.

"You have to smile, as you'll be joining them soon enough," Rodriguez quipped as he tended the tiny grave of his brother Jose Antonio, who died aged four months in 1974.

"It's a day for everyone in the city to remember their dead, and we make a party of it," working mother Sofia Lopez said in Ciudad Juarez as she knelt to heap golden marigolds on the dirt grave of her daughter, Elizabeth, who died in 1990.

"We come here to spend a little time with her, just as if she were alive," she added, as around her visitors raked dirt by the tombs of much-loved family members, and touched up weathered headstones with paint.

In some indigenous communities in the Yucatan peninsula in sultry southeast Mexico, families traditionally take the bones of dead relatives out of their vaults ahead of the two-day festival, cleaning and caressing them in an annual rite.

Altars loaded with flowers and large skeleton figures -- some in indigenous dress, others as Spanish conquistadors -- were set up in Mexico City's vast central square on Monday, and incense filled the air.

Day of the Dead spills out of the cemeteries and small-town graveyards into shops, restaurants and homes across Mexico, where the souls of the dead are beckoned home with altars charged with votive candles, candy skulls and cherished keepsakes.

Offerings include "pan de muerto," a cake sprinkled with sugar and decorated to look like bones, as well as tequila shots and a glass of water to quench the returning spirit's thirst after the journey from the afterlife.

While supermarket chains increasingly stock up on pumpkins and Halloween masks imported from Mexico's powerful NAFTA-partner to the north, few doubt the resilience of the national tradition to hold its own against trick-or-treating.

"It is important to conserve and pass on traditions to children," lawyer Elizabeth Maldonado said as she tended her mother's grave at Mexico City's urban Dolores cemetery, while around her children dressed as devils and clowns played hide-and-seek among the tombstones.

"But (the children) are happy with costumes, and that doesn't damage tradition. It's a mixture," she added.

Brain differences?

2004-11-03T05:13:00.000-07:00

As I try to remain calm, this interesting article from CNN.com:

SAN DIEGO, California (AP) -- Applying some of the same brain-scan technology used to understand Alzheimer's and autism, scientists are trying to learn what makes a Republican's mind different from a Democrat's.

Brain scanning is moving rapidly beyond diseases to measuring how we react to religious experiences, racial prejudice, even Coke versus Pepsi. This election season, some scientists are trying to find out whether the technology can help political consultants get inside voters' heads more effectively than focus groups or polls.

Already, the scientists are predicting that brain scanning -- known as functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI -- will be a campaign staple four years from now, despite ethical concerns about "neuromarketing."

Brain scans measure blood flow. When brain cells start firing in a part of the brain that governs a particular emotion or activity, they need more oxygen, which is carried by the blood. During an fMRI, active regions of the brain can be seen lighting up on a computer monitor.

Last month, Drs. Joshua Freedman and Marco Iacoboni of the University of California at Los Angeles finished scanning the brains of 10 Republicans and 10 Democrats. Each viewed images of President Bush, John Kerry and Ralph Nader.

When viewing their favorite candidate, all showed increased activity in the region implicated in empathy. And when viewing the opposition, all had increased blood flow in the region where humans consciously assert control over emotions -- suggesting the volunteers were actively attempting to dislike the opposition.

Nonetheless, some differences appeared between the brain activity of Democrats and Republicans. Take empathy: One Democrat's brain lit up at an image of Kerry "with a profound sense of connection, like a beautiful sunset," Freedman said. Brain activity in a Republican shown an image of Bush was "more interpersonal, such as if you smiled at someone and they smiled back."

And when voters were shown a Bush ad that included images of the September 11 attacks, the amygdala region of the brain -- which lights up for most of us when we see snakes -- illuminated more for Democrats than Republicans. The researchers' conclusion: At a subconscious level, Republicans were apparently not as bothered by what Democrats found alarming.

"People make tons of decisions and often they don't know why," Iacoboni said. "A lot of decision-making is unconscious, and brain imaging will be used in the near future to perceive and decide about politicians."

Freedman came to political brain scanning through his brother Tom, who served as a consultant to President Clinton. Tom Freedman asked his neuroscientist brother if the technology could improve on how campaigns woo voters.

"No one had done fMRI with politics," Dr. Freedman said. "So we decided to see what we could find."

The UCLA researchers said they have not been contacted by any political consultants other than Freedman's brother and a collaborator, though they expect that to change after the election.
Already, some companies are dabbling in neuromarketing.

DaimlerChrysler used MRIs to gauge interest in different makes of cars. Researchers at the California Institute of Technology are scanning brains for reaction to movie trailers. Baylor University scientists just published brain scans suggesting preference for Coke or Pepsi is culturally influenced, and not just a matter of taste.

"This is a story of the corruption of medical research," warned Gary Ruskin, who runs a Portland, Oregon, nonprofit organization called Commercial Alert. "It's a technology that should be used to ease human suffering, not make political propaganda more effective."

Moon phases thingy

2004-11-02T05:36:00.000-07:00

Shamelessly swiped from Chandira ( Diary of a Hope Fiend ) is the cool little Moon phases thingy in the sidebar.

Tycho Brahe's star found after 400+ years

2004-11-02T05:14:00.000-07:00

On election day, I think I want to focus on fun stuff ;) and avoid the news until tonight. In that spirit, some astronomy news from www.space.com :

432-Year Search: Lost Star Found
By Robert Roy Britt Senior Science Writer
posted: 01 November, 20047:00 a.m. ET

Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe spotted a new star in the sky on Nov. 11, 1572, and astronomers have been trying ever since to figure out exactly what happened. The case appeared to be solved last week.

A star racing away from the explosive scene has been found. It is streaming through space three times faster than others in its vicinity, a dead giveaway that it was shot like a cannon from the scene of a supernova eruption, astronomers claim.

Tycho's supernova, as it is called, was one of those crucial events of science, used to refute the centuries-old view of Aristotle that the heavens were static.

Here's what astronomers think happened: A hot, dense and dying star called white dwarf was sucking lots of material off a normal companion star. The white dwarf was condensed by all the new material, triggering a thermonuclear explosion whose brightness temporarily exceeded a billion suns.

The companion was struck by the explosion and shoved on a new course related to its former orbital path.

Fleeing the scene

The visible light faded with time, but the region still emits intense X-ray and radio energy as an expanding bubble of matter slams into interstellar gas. Astronomers have long monitored it in hopes of learning whether the scenario they use to describe the cataclysm is accurate or not.
A team led by Pilar Ruiz-Lapuente of the University of Barcelona has spotted the somewhat depleted remains of the companion. Its path and speed, and the fact that it is not far from the center of the expanding visual remnant of the explosion, suggest it was indeed involved in the supernova.

"The star sticks out," Ruiz-Lapuente told SPACE.com. "It has a much higher velocity than the [other] stars at that location."

The whole scene is about 10,000 light-years from Earth. A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion kilometers). So the explosion actually occurred about 10,432 years ago, and its light first reached Tycho's eyes 432 years ago.

The new studied relied on data from the Hubble Space Telescope and other observatories. The finding was detailed last week in the journal Nature.

What it means

The finding will help researchers better understand the conditions under which a certain type of stellar explosion occurs. Some astronomers have suggested type 1a supernovas -- the variety apparently seen by Tycho Brahe -- might be the result of stellar collisions between two white dwarfs, rather than the mass-transfer idea.

"If we accept that the companion has been identified, then we now know for the first time that not all type-Ia supernovae are produced by coalescence of white dwarfs," writes University of Oklahoma physicist David Branch in an analysis of the work for the journal.

All this is important in part because type 1a supernovas are rare in our galaxy but common in the universe as a whole. All of them achieve an almost identical maximum brightness, then fade at a nearly identical rate. So astronomers use them as "standard candles" to measure distances to faraway galaxies.

In the late 1990s, studies of these supernovas revealed that the universe is mysteriously expanding at an accelerated pace. Some unknown force, dubbed dark energy, is thought to be behind the expansion.

"The profound cosmological implications of this are the motivation for astronomers to strive to better understand this class of supernova," Branch says.

With advances in telescopes, astronomers hunt down the supernovas deeper in space and farther back in time in an effort to pin down the properties of dark energy, a crucial first step in figuring out what it is.

Astronomers say a supernova ought to fire about every 100 years in a galaxy like the Milky Way. Another one, named for German astronomer Johannes Kepler, appeared in 1604. But none have been spotted since. The nearest recent supernova seen, named 1987A, was spotted in 1987 in our galactic neighbor, the Large Magellanic Cloud.

This article is part of SPACE.com's weekly Mystery Monday series.

Give me a break!

2004-11-01T09:05:00.000-07:00

Look, I know that a lot of so-called Bible-thumpers hate Harry Potter. I am not a so-called Bible-thumper, and therefore find this article both funny and sad, for all sorts of reasons. Believe in God, believe in the Devil, okay. That's all fine. But an 18-year-old boy should have other things on his mind than whether or not reading Harry Potter is going to damn his immortal soul. Argh...I could go into a rant, I really could. I think instead I'll just post the article, which I found on Yahoo:

Pupil Appeals Harry Potter 'Witchcraft'
JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - A South African schoolboy appealed to education authorities after refusing to answer an exam question on Harry Potter because he believes the best-selling children's books promote witchcraft.

Eighteen-year-old John Smit did not answer a comprehension question on a review of one of J.K. Rowling's books on the boy wizard, worth 30 percent of his English exam.

"He wouldn't answer it because it supports witchcraft, and we're against witchcraft ... the Bible is against witchcraft," Smit's mother, who did not wish to give her first name, told Reuters.

The family has written to provincial director of examinations to complain. Authorities have yet to respond.

"I hope they will give him his average mark. This shouldn't happen again," she said.

African Christian Democratic Party MP Cheryllyn Dudley said South Africa needed a clear policy to avoid other pupils facing moral dilemmas during exams.

"I have read (Harry Potter books), I have researched them thoroughly, and my personal opinion is that they are witchcraft manuals," Dudley told Reuters.

Priestly ghost

2004-10-31T07:52:00.000-07:00

Just in time for Halloween, from www.cnn.com :

KANSAS CITY, Missouri (AP) -- As the legend goes, St. Mary's Episcopal Church is haunted by the ghost of Father Henry David Jardine, a 19th century priest whose footsteps still echo throughout the Gothic-style sanctuary.

On the eve of Halloween, St. Mary's will try to separate fact from fiction by bringing together the ghostly tales and historical documents about Jardine's life, which has been shrouded for years in mystery and intrigue.

"He is quite a legend. And sometimes it's hard to know what to believe," said Todd Chenault, the unofficial church historian who organized Saturday's $45-a-plate dinner. The event will feature fake fog and music from the church's 30-foot organ.

Chenault, 45, who has gone to St. Mary's all his life, remembers trading spooky stories about Jardine with his fellow Sunday school students in the 1960s. As an adult, however, he has worked to get the true story about the priest.

Rumor has it that Jardine killed himself in the church's third-story living area and was buried in a basement vault. Not true, Chenault said.

Old newspaper clippings show Jardine died in 1886 in St. Louis, not Kansas City. St. Mary's does have a tomb, but the downtown parish that Jardine commissioned was not finished until months after his death. The stigma of suicide kept him from ever resting in the crypt, which instead holds boxes of cereal and canned goods for the needy.

On more than one occasion, Chenault says, he has heard footsteps shuffling from behind the organ. When he was a child, Christmas trees fell off ledges near the instrument for no reason, year after year.

"Have I heard things? Yes, plenty of times," Chenault said. "Have I seen any ghosts? No, never."

According to church archives, from 1879 to 1886 Jardine increased St. Mary's membership, created a hospital and schools for children.

Betty Herndon, who will help lead the Saturday event billed as "The Historic Haunting," said many church members during Jardine's time praised his emphasis on old Roman Catholic ways, but others were not as accepting. Influential members spread rumors, hoping for his resignation, Herndon said.

Jardine also was accused of misusing parish funds, drug use and immoral behavior with young church girls. The scandal prompted the priest to file a libel suit against a former editor of The Kansas City Times, John Shea. Jardine lost the case.

"It was a kangaroo court; witnesses made outrageous claims with no evidence. You name it," said Chenault, who said he reviewed court documents from the lawsuit.

Jardine then traveled to St. Louis, where his priesthood was revoked. Days before he was scheduled to contest the decision, he was found dead. In his hands, according to newspaper accounts, were a crucifix and rag soaked in chloroform.

Herndon said Jardine commonly inhaled the toxic drug to ease facial muscle spasms, so his death might have been accidental. He said few believed Jardine committed suicide or the allegations that came before. Arriving by train, Jardine's casket was covered in black cloth and his congregation came to view it.

"The scene was sorrowful, even to a stranger," The Kansas City Times reported.

Church archives show St. Mary's buried the priest a day later on unconsecrated ground for $88. The funeral precession stretched for more than a mile.

Over the past 100 years Jardine's remains have been exhumed and moved three times, most recently in 2000 to return his remains to St. Mary's. His ashes rest by the organ, under the church's high altar.

"Religious believers live in a spirit world," said the current rector, Father Jeffrey Cave. "We pray to be surrounded by angels and so forth. Ghost stories like Jardine's are all too common."

Pompeii gets virtual makeover

2004-10-31T03:19:00.000-07:00

As the election nears, I find myself definitely shying away from any political posts--though I know I will post something--mainly because of stress. And so, here's yet another post to my Zero Room:

Pompeii gets digital make-over

The old-fashioned audio tour of historical places could soon be replaced with computer-generated images that bring the site to life.

A European Union-funded project is looking at providing tourists with computer-augmented versions of archaeological attractions.

It would allow visitors a glimpse of life as it was originally lived in places such as Pompeii.

It could pave the way for a new form of cultural tourism.

Combining real and virtual

The technology would allow digital people and other computer-generated elements to be combined with the actual view seen by tourists as they walk around an historical site.

The Lifeplus project is part of the EU's Information Society Technologies initiative aimed at promoting user-friendly technology and enhancing European cultural heritage. Engineers and researchers working in the Europe-wide consortium have come up with a prototype augmented-reality system.

It would require the visitor to wear a head-mounted display with a miniature camera and a backpack computer.

The camera captures the view and feeds it to software on the computer where the visitor's viewpoint is combined with animated virtual elements.

At Pompeii for example, the visitor would not just see the frescos, taverns and villas that have been excavated, but also people going about their daily life.

Augmented reality has been used to create special effects in films such as Troy and Lord of the Rings and in computer gaming.

Bringing past to life

"This technology can now be used for much more than just computer games," said Professor Nadia Magnenat-Thalman of the Swiss research group MiraLab.

"We are, for the first time, able to run this combination of software processes to create walking, talking people with believable clothing, skin and hair in real-time," she said. Unlike virtual reality, which delivers an entirely computer-generated scene to the viewer, the Lifeplus project is about combining digital and real views.

Crucial to the technique is the software that interprets the visitor's view and provides an accurate match between the real and virtual elements.

The software capable of doing this has been developed by a UK company, 2d3. Andrew Stoddart, chief scientist at 2d3, said that the EU project has been driven by a new desire to bring the past to life.

"The popularity of television documentaries and dramatisations using computer-generated imagery to recreate scenes from ancient history demonstrates the widespread appeal of bringing ancient cultures to life," he said.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/technology/3954659.stm
Published: 2004/10/31 07:27:18 GMT© BBC MMIV

Carl Sagan said we're made of star-stuff

2004-10-29T09:07:00.001-06:00

This is so cool!

Ancient Star Dust May Point to Human Origins

Thu Oct 28,12:24 PM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Star dust found deep beneath the Pacific Ocean has led German scientists to speculate that a supernova explosion 3 million years ago might possibly have helped bring about human evolution.

Gunther Korschinek and colleagues at the Technical University of Munich in Germany reported on Wednesday they found debris from an exploding supernova that could have changed the climate on Earth around the time that humanity's ancestors first began to walk.

Depending on how far away the supernova was, it might have caused an increase in cosmic rays for about 300,000 years that in turn could have heated up the Earth, they wrote in the latest issue of Physical Review Letters.

The timing of the star explosion coincides with a change in the climate in Africa, when drier conditions caused forests to retreat and the savannah to emerge. Anthropologists and other experts believe this change brought early hominids out of the trees, forcing them to walk upright.

The most famous pre-human, a skeleton nicknamed "Lucy," dates back just about 3 million years. Lucy and her Australopithecus afarensis kin would have walked upright.

Korschinek's team was the first, five years ago, to find real matter from a star on Earth, in Pacific sediments.

This time they looked for star dust at a site much deeper, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean near the equator and away from land roughly south of the Hawaiian islands.

There, 15,750 feet below the surface, they found a layer of iron-60, stable layers under the sea that are easy to date. This one can be dated to about 2.8 million years ago, they said.

Iron-60 is an isotope or chemical variant of iron that is rare on Earth and which scientists believe is unlikely to have come from anything other than a supernova.

It has a decay rate or half-life of about 1.5 million years, which can help pinpoint when the star exploded, sending out not only solid matter in the form of iron and other elements, but cosmic rays.

Korschinek and colleagues noted that other scientists have suggested a cosmic ray bombardment could affect the ozone layer, letting in more of the Sun's ultraviolet rays.

This in turn could make it hotter and drier in places.

"It has not yet been established that such an increase of the cosmic ray intensity could have had a significant influence on the Earth's climate," they wrote.

But they do note a coincidence.

"The African climate shifted toward more arid conditions about 2.8 million years ago," they wrote, adding, "some of the major events in early hominid evolution appear to be coeval with the African climate changes."

As a Hungarian, I can say that this sucks

2004-10-29T09:05:00.000-06:00

BUDAPEST (Reuters) - Hungary plunged into a national culinary crisis on Thursday as its beloved paprika powder -- and any products containing the hot red spice -- vanished from shop shelves because of a contamination scare.

Thousands of Hungarians flooded a telephone hotline to inquire about food safety after the authorities said on Wednesday they had discovered traces of a toxin in some paprika samples at warehouses.

Retailers were ordered to clear the shelves of any paprika-containing products until further notice while consumers were told to abstain from eating them until further notice.

The announcement caused a shock in a country where the average citizen consumes a pound of paprika -- the defining flavor of goulash, the national dish -- each year.

"This shakes the foundations of Hungarian cooking because we can't cook without paprika," said Eszter Molnar, a 27-year-old office worker in the southern town of Kalocsa.

"I'll have to throw out all the paprika I have, I don't know what I can trust any more."

Okay, I'm a geek

2004-10-29T05:39:00.000-06:00

I find this stuff fascinating!

Titan Rich in Carbons That Gave Life to Earth --NASA

Thu Oct 28, 5:53 PM ET
Science - Reuters
By Gina Keating

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Saturn's mysterious moon Titan appears to have an environment rich in the carbon-based molecules that spawned life on Earth and winds that etched streaks into its icy surface, NASA scientists said on Thursday.

Most exciting to scientists who hoped to unlock the origins of life by studying chemical reactions in Titan's soil and atmosphere were apparent signs of large amounts of a sort of primordial slush on its frozen surface.

"On early Earth there was organic material and something happened to those molecules that gave rise to life," scientist Jonathan Lunine said. "We had to find a place elsewhere in the system where that process is being replicated ... and it seems to be happening on Titan."

Images returned by the spaceship Cassini also suggested "an enormous amount of geology going on" on Titan including past eruptions of water-vapor-spewing volcanoes and "eggshell cracking" on its surface, Lunine said.

During a 44-hour flyby that ended on Tuesday, Cassini collected hundreds of images and radar data that pierced the veil of smog surrounding Titan for the first time.

The radar images showed streaks that resembled lava flows on Venus, triangular upthrusts that could be rocks, and what could be a chain of frozen lakes containing organic matter, JPL director Charles Elachi, who heads the radar team, said.

The radar data, covering just 1 percent of Titan's surface, also showed a deep surface layer of something that appears to be organic material rather than a rocky face, Elachi said.

"We are seeing a place that is alive ... geologically speaking," Elachi said. "We have read a couple of pages of the mystery book."

Although Titan's equatorial temperature stays far below freezing, the water ice at its core may be mixed with ammonia, whose lower freezing point may allow it to thaw and flow across the moon's surface in volcanic eruptions, scientists said.

The resulting streaks and flows observed around Titan's midsection also could have been caused by the movement of its heavy atmosphere, scientists said.

Cassini, which carries a piggyback probe called Huygens, is expected to fly by Titan 44 more times during its four-year mission to explore Saturn and its rings and moon.

In January, Huygens will parachute to Titan's surface to take readings of its dense atmosphere and soil.

The $3-billion mission, launched in 1997, is a joint project of NASA and the European and Italian
space agencies.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=570&e=14&u=/nm/space_cassini_dc

Hobbitses!

2004-10-28T09:40:00.000-06:00

Well, okay, not really hobbitses, but still, pretty damn amazing...

MSNBC.com
Ancient hobbit-sized human species discoveredFind 'rewrites knowledge of human evolution,' scientists say

The Associated Press
Updated: 4:33 p.m. ET Oct. 27, 2004

In an astonishing discovery that could rewrite the history of human evolution, scientists say they have found the skeleton of a new human species, a dwarf, marooned for eons in a tropical Lost World while modern humans rapidly colonized the rest of the planet.

The finding on a remote Indonesian island has stunned anthropologists like no other in recent memory. It is a fundamentally new creature that bears more of a resemblance to fictional, barefooted hobbits than modern humans.

Yet biologically speaking, it may have been closely related to us and perhaps even shared its caves with our ancestors.

18,000-year-old specimen

The 3-foot-tall (90-centimeter-tall) adult female skeleton found in a cave is believed 18,000 years old. It smashes the long-cherished scientific belief that our species, Homo sapiens, systematically crowded out other upright-walking human cousins beginning 160,000 years ago and that we’ve had Earth to ourselves for tens of thousands of years.

Instead, it suggests recent evolution was more complex than previously thought.
And it demonstrates that Africa, the acknowledged cradle of humanity, does not hold all the answers to persistent questions of how — and where — we came to be.

“This finding really does rewrite our knowledge of human evolution,” said Chris Stringer, who directs human origins studies at the Natural History Museum in London. “And to have them present less than 20,000 years ago is frankly astonishing.”

Shortest member of human familyScientists called the dwarf skeleton “the most extreme” figure to be included in the extended human family. Certainly, she is the shortest.

She is the best example of a trove of fragmented bones that account for as many as seven of these primitive individuals that lived on the equatorial island of Flores, located east of Java and northwest of Australia. The mostly intact female skeleton was found in September 2003.

Scientists have named the extinct species Homo floresiensis, or Flores Man, and details appear in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature.

The specimens’ ages range from 95,000 to 12,000 years old, meaning they lived until the threshold of recorded human history and perhaps crossed paths with the ancestors of today’s islanders.

Flores Man was hardly formidable. His grapefruit-sized brain was two-thirds smaller than ours, and closer to the brains of today’s chimpanzees and transitional prehuman species in Africa than vanished 2 million years ago.

Yet Flores Man made stone tools, lit fires and organized group hunts for meat. Bones of fish, birds and rodents found near the skeleton were charred, suggesting they were cooked.
All this suggests Flores Man lived communally and communicated effectively, perhaps even verbally.

“It is arguably the most significant discovery concerning our own genus in my lifetime,” said anthropologist Bernard Wood of George Washington University, who reviewed the research independently.

Discoveries simply “don’t get any better than that,” proclaimed Robert Foley and Marta Mirazon Lahr of Cambridge University in a written analysis.

Questions over classification

To others, the species’ baffling combination of slight dimensions and coarse features bears almost no meaningful comparison either to modern humans or to our larger, archaic cousins.

They suggest that Flores Man doesn’t belong in the genus Homo at all, even if it was a recent contemporary. But they are unsure where to classify it.

“I don’t think anybody can pigeonhole this into the very simple-minded theories of what is human,” anthropologist Jeffrey Schwartz of the University of Pittsburgh. “There is no biological reason to call it Homo. We have to rethink what it is.”

For now, most researchers have been limited to examining digital photographs of the specimens. The female partial skeleton and other fragments are stored in a laboratory in Jakarta, Indonesia.

Researchers from Australia and Indonesia found the partial skeleton 13 months ago in a shallow limestone cave known as Liang Bua. The cave, which extends into a hillside for about 130 feet (40 meters), has been the subject of scientific analysis since 1964. Fenced off and patrolled by guards, it is surrounded by coffee farms.

Older stone tools and other artifacts previously found on the island suggest that Flores Man is part of a substantial archaic human lineage.

“So the 18,000-year-old skeleton cannot be some kind of ’freak’ that we just happened to stumble across,” said one of the discoverers, radiocarbon dating expert Richard G. Roberts of the University of Wollongong in Australia.

Peculiar environment

But the environment in which Flores Man lived was indeed peculiar, and scientists say it probably contributed to the specimen’s unusually small dimensions.

Millennia ago, Flores was a kind of a looking-glass world, a real-life Middle-earth inhabited by a menagerie of fantastical creatures like giant tortoises, elephants as small as ponies and rats as big as hunting dogs.

It even had a dragon, although they were giant lizards like today’s carnivorous Komodo dragons rather than the treasure-hoarding Smaug described by novelist J.R.R. Tolkien in his “Lord of the Rings” trilogy.

Artifacts suggest that a big-boned human cousin, Homo erectus, migrated from Java to Flores and other islands, perhaps by bamboo raft, nearly 1 million years ago.

Researchers suspect that Flores Man probably is a descendant of Homo erectus that was squeezed by the pressures of natural selection.

Dwarfism in nature

Nature is full of mammals — deer, squirrels and pigs, for example — living in marginal, isolated environments that gradually dwarf when food isn’t plentiful and predators aren’t threatening.

This is the first time that the evolution of dwarfism has been recorded in a human relative, said the study’s lead author, Peter Brown of the University of New England in Australia.

Just how this primitive, remnant species managed to hang on is uncertain. Inbreeding certainly would have been a danger. Geologic evidence suggests a massive volcanic eruption sealed its fate 12,000 years ago, along with other unusual island species like the dwarf elephant species, stegodon.

Now, scientists are more puzzled by the specimen’s jumble of features that appear to be borrowed from different human ancestors.

Clues from the skeleton

This much is clear: Its worn teeth and fused skull show it was an adult. The shape of the pelvis is female. The skull is wide like that of Homo erectus. But the sides are rounder and the crown traces an arc from ear to ear. The skull of Homo erectus has straight sides and a pointed crown, they said.

The lower jaw contains large, blunt teeth and roots like Australopithecus, a prehuman ancestor in Africa more than 3 million years ago. The front teeth are smaller and more like modern human teeth.

The eye sockets are big and round, but unlike other members of the Homo genus, it has hardly any chin or browline.

The rest of the skeleton looks as if it walked upright, but the pelvis and the shinbone have primitive, even apelike features.

Bones from the species’ feet and hands have not yet been found. Delicate artifacts found in the cave were described as “toy-sized” versions of stone tools made by Homo erectus. They suggest that Flores Man retained intelligence and dexterity to flake small weapons with sharp edges, even if its body shrunk over time.

“I’ve spent a sleepless night trying to figure out what to do with this thing,” said Schwartz. “It’s a mind-blower. It makes me think of nothing else in this world.”

Even more speculative is whether Flores Man met with modern humans, and what might have happened.

Folklore experts have reported persistent legends of little people living on Flores and nearby islands. Islanders called the creature “Ebu Gogo” and say it was about 3 feet tall.

Copyright 2004 The Associated Press.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6346939/

Magnum Opus

2004-10-25T17:49:00.000-06:00

In the 1980s, Berke Breathed lived in Evergreen, CO, and I once saw him getting a ticket on the side of the road with his motorcycle. I adore this man's comics, always have, always will.

Cartoonist delivers his magnum 'Opus'

Mon Oct 25, 7:12 AM ET By Kathy Balog Special for USA TODAY

In a country underscored by 15-second celebrity and bizarre political twists, few fictional characters have channeled our collective out-of-control insecurities better than Opus, the beleaguered, lumpy-billed Everypenguin at the center of Berkeley Breathed's comic parallel universe Bloom County.

When the landmark cartoon strip burst onto comics pages in 1981, the Cold War still raged, an ex-movie star occupied the Oval Office, and Donald Trump was a rising star. That's why today's release of the retrospective Opus: 25 years of His Sunday Best (Little, Brown, $29.95), which includes 215 strips, lends itself to wicked comparisons of what was then and what is now.

Consider: The strip's oddball cast of characters, who skipped between reality and the surreal, foreshadowed today's mainstream mix of fiction and truth, even down to their 1989 exit. Prophetically, the original comic strip ended when Trump, the future star of NBC reality show The Apprentice, buys the comic strip and tells Bloom County's cast: "You're fired."

Back then, pop culture references to current events were scarce, says Breathed, 47: "For topical humor in the media, you essentially had Doonesbury, Saturday Night Live and Johnny Carson's monologue. Today, we are tush-deep in snarky commentary on things that happened not last week, but a few minutes ago."

Breathed (rhymes with method) is no stranger to snarky. Few news events escaped mention in Bloom County. The arms race and religion in the classroom drew big story lines, public condemnation and a huge cult following. "Humor comes from confrontation not conciliation," says Breathed, something he sees mushrooming to nuclear proportions, courtesy of the Internet and cable TV's "instant punditry."

Eventually, Breathed says he "grew weary of looking for the negative in everything," and concentrated instead on other projects, including a less-demanding spinoff Sunday-only strip Outland, published collections of his early strips and a string of children's picture books. There are 8 million copies in print of Breathed's 19 books, and he has signed a Hollywood deal to bring Opus to the big screen, a project still in development.

When he returned to newspapers a year ago with his reinvented Sundays-only Opus, carried by 185 newspapers, about half the number of Bloom County at its height, the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist found little innovation in the comics section. "It's hard to push the envelope anymore. If Bloom County were starting now, I could never get away with what I did then. I'm getting my hand slapped more than I ever was in the '80s. It's a genre that doesn't want to get shook up."

Asked to name a scandal he'd like to pounce on, he becomes circumspect. "Bill O'Reilly and his loofah mitt in the shower. Or the one where we invade the wrong country after being lied to, and it costs tens of thousands of lives. Either is just as fun, but people seem oddly more concerned with the former."

And while he continues to lob satire-laced bombs via Opus, Breathed concedes that "today's political environment is less an 'easy target' than it is one shot to living hell. I can't - don't want to - compete with this, especially only appearing weekly. So it's been a pleasure stepping back a bit. Not that Donald Trump gags don't live forever."

Asked to name his favorite strip, Breathed says, "The image that never fails to make me giggle like a Catholic school girl giggling at a dirty book" is from a recent strip: Opus dreams of meeting a beautiful island girl on a tropical beach, and it turns out to be Michael Jackson, who starts chasing him demanding "A snuggle." Opus runs for the hills screaming, "I'M SORRY I'VE GOT A WAFFLE BURNING!"

Says Breathed: "I put that image on the endpapers of the book, just to remind me that to an embarrassing extent, I can still manage to amuse myself."

Man who found "Iceman" found dead

2004-10-24T04:28:00.000-06:00

VIENNA (Reuters) - The man who 13 years ago discovered the frozen remains of a prehistoric iceman in an Alpine glacier was found dead in the Austrian Alps on Saturday, eight days after he went missing, rescue authorities said.

Helmut Simon, the German who found the 5,300-year-old mummified body while hiking on the border of Austria and Italy in 1991, disappeared on Oct. 15 after setting off alone on an expedition in the Bad Hofgastein region in southwestern Austria.

"He was found at an altitude of around 2,200 meters (7,220 ft), apparently having fallen around 100 meters," a member of the Bad Hofgastein mountain rescue team told Reuters.

Rescue officials found and recovered the body of the experienced 67-year-old mountaineer after a local hunter notified them of a mysterious red spot high up on the 2,300-meter Gaiskarkogel mountain.

Simon, 67, and his wife, Erika, from Nuremberg in Germany found the neolithic iceman on the 3,000-meter (9,000-feet) high Similaun glacier in the Tyrolean Oetz Valley. The mummy was named "Oetzi" after the valley.

My nom de plume

2004-10-23T07:04:00.000-06:00

I have chosen a nom de plume that seems to me to accurately reflect my inner elderly bitch ;) For those of you who watch British comedies, the reference will be immediately apparent in my choice of Diana Trent as said nom de plume. For everyone else, she's an unmarried elderly woman, fiercely independent, fiercely loyal to family and friends, and gives a new definition to the term "outspoken." I am not near as old as dear Diana, but I feel a deep kinship with her. Oh, the comedy she's on is called "Waiting For God."

Chandira

2004-10-23T06:42:00.000-06:00

When I went to England to research my failed biography of Andrew Irvine, one of the things I brought away with me as a treasure in my memory was the feel of the grass at Oxford. Lush, rich grass beneath my feet, like walking on moss or velvet. For me, that's one of the things that still evokes England...

Becks escapes punishment

2004-10-23T06:24:00.000-06:00

Ohmigawd, do I love this man or what? Sorry, can't help it... And today's Miami Herald reports that he has escaped punishment for his yellow-card stunt. Good for Becks ;) Sorry, can't help it...

FA Won't Punish Beckham Over Yellow Card

Associated Press

LONDON - David Beckham won't be punished by England's soccer federation for intentionally getting a yellow card in a World Cup qualifying game.

The Football Association said Thursday there was "insufficient evidence" to pursue a case against Beckham, who acknowledged he deliberately fouled defender Ben Thatcher in England's 2-0 win over Wales on Oct. 9 at Old Trafford.

Beckham, who already was carrying a yellow card from a previous game, said he did it in order to get another yellow that would automatically suspend him for England's game four days later at Azerbaijan.

Beckham had broken a rib moments before in a collision with Thatcher and realized he would have to sit out the next match anyway.

Beckham was severely criticized by FIFA president Sepp Blatter and others for violating the spirit of fair play. Blatter asked the FA to take action.

Beckham issued a formal apology.

"Following due process under the FA's disciplinary regulations, the FA's compliance department has reviewed all available information and concluded that there is insufficient evidence to pursue a disciplinary charge," the FA said in a statement.

"However, David Beckham has been reminded of his responsibilities and the rules of conduct he is expected to adhere to both as an England player and as captain. The FA now considers this matter to be closed."

Tony Blair denies he's converting

2004-10-23T06:16:00.000-06:00

Interesting tidbit that I didn't think quite fit totally in my political blog:

Blair dismisses speculation about conversion

Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair dismissed speculation he intends to convert from the Church of England to Roman Catholicism. Blair commented after British newspaper quotes from the Rev. Timothy Russ, who regularly leads Catholic services at Blair's country estate, Chequers.'

'If you ask me do you think he wants to become a Catholic, I would say yes,'' Russ was quoted as saying, and: ''He didn't say to me, 'Can I become a Catholic?' What he said to me was, 'Can the prime minister be a Catholic?' ''Britain's Press Association said Blair responded to reporters, ''I am saying no. Don't they run this once a year? I think they do. Every year I get this."

British Prime Minister Tony Blair awaits the arrival of United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan at his official residence, 10 Downing Street in central London, Tuesday Oct. 19, 2004. Blair said Tuesday British troops would only be redeployed to the more volatile, U.S.-controlled sector of Iraq if it was militarily justified.

Blair has regularly accompanied his Catholic wife Cherie and their children to Mass, triggering conversion speculation. By law, Britain's monarch must be Protestant. There is no legal barrier to a Catholic prime minister but there hasn't been one since the title came into use in the early 18th century, a constitutional expert said.

--The Associated Press

3,000 year old Chinese tombs found

2004-10-20T05:16:00.000-06:00

From this morning's news:

Archaeologists unearth 3,000-year-old tombs in northwest China
Tue Oct 19, 1:19 PM ET
BEIJING (AFP) - Chinese archaeologists are unearthing a group of tombs believed to be the family cemetery of the Duke of Zhou, a de facto imperial ruler who lived about 3,000 years ago, state media said.

Archaeologists discovered the group of 22 tombs in February at Qi Mountain in the northwestern province of Shaanxi. They cover an area of about 80,000 square meters (860,800 square feet), the Xinhua news agency reported.

Ten of the tombs each have four passages -- an indication that the owner was from the highest rank in the the Western Zhou Dynasty (11th century BC - 771 BC).

"Judging from the scale of the tombs, the owner might be somebody of high rank, a duke, a prince, or even a king of the Western Zhou Dynasty," said Lei Xingshan, associate archaeology professor at Beijing University.

Four inscriptions on some 700 tortoise shells unearthed during the excavation suggested that the tombs were linked to the duke's family.

The archaeologists also unearthed a 1,500-meter (4,950-feet) city wall and six construction ruins.

The Duke of Zhou was the founder of the Western Zhou Dynasty. He helped his brother overthrow the Shang Dynasty (c.1600 BC - c.1100 BC) and became prince regent to his brother's young son after the brother died.

He was best known for established the ancient feudal hierarchy and etiquette systems that laid the foundation for Chinese civilization.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1540&e=10&u=/afp/china_archaeology

Lord Lucan investigation reopened

2004-10-17T05:25:00.000-06:00

From the BBC, this article on the murder investigation of Lord Lucan:

Lord Lucan murder case reopened

The investigation into the Lord Lucan murder case has reopened - almost 30 years after his
disappearance.

Detectives are examining existing police evidence and will use DNA profiling to try to solve the case.

The 7th Earl of Lucan vanished in November 1974, a day after the murdered body of his children's nanny Sandra Rivett was found at his London home.

Over the years numerous people have claimed sightings of the aristocrat, whose body has never been found.

There's still information coming into the police every year and each call is assessed and lines pursued where appropriate Police spokesman

A Scotland Yard spokesman said: "As with any unsolved murder the investigation is subject to review to examine any possible new lines of inquiry.

"There's still information coming into the police every year and each call is assessed and lines pursued where appropriate."

Declared dead

Lord Lucan's blood-soaked car was found abandoned in the port town of Newhaven, East Sussex, leading some, including his wife Lady Veronica Lucan, to believe he had drowned himself in the English Channel.

He was officially declared dead by the High Court in 1999.

A photograph of an elderly man - claimed to be Lord Lucan - was dismissed last year when it turned out to be that of a banjo player from Merseyside.

Former Scotland Yard detective Duncan MacLaughlin claimed in a newspaper that the missing Earl had died in Goa, India, in 1996.

He said the 1991 photograph of a dishevelled man with a long beard bore a resemblance to the 7th Earl of Lucan and claimed he had lived under the assumed name Barry Halpin, or Jungle Barry.

But BBC Radio 2 presenter Mike Harding poured cold water on the claim, saying that Barry Halpin, or Mountain Barry as he was known, was actually a well-known figure on the 1960s UK folk music scene.

Story from BBC NEWS:http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/uk/3748892.stm
Published: 2004/10/16 10:54:22 GMT© BBC MMIV

This is just insane

2004-10-12T10:40:00.000-06:00

From Reuters (and wasn't The Ring set in Kanagawa Province? I'll have to look that up...)

TOKYO (Reuters) - Japanese police said on Tuesday they were investigating a suspected group suicide involving seven people who met through the Internet, the latest in a rash of suicides linked to the Web.

The four men and three women, mostly in their 20s, were found dead on Tuesday in a car parked on a mountain road in Minano in Saitama prefecture near Tokyo, officers said.

Police said they found four charcoal stoves in the car, which was wrapped in blue plastic sheets and had its windows sealed from the inside.

"We believe they all died after inhaling carbon monoxide from the charcoal," a police spokesman said. "We believe they got acquainted through the Internet."

One of the seven had sent an e-mail to a friend on Monday saying he would commit suicide, the spokesman said.

"We found no traces of violence that could have otherwise led to their deaths," he said.
Empty cans of liquor were found inside the car and a box of sleeping pills near the silver vehicle, Kyodo news agency said.

No religious prohibitions exist in Japan against suicide and it has long been seen as a way to escape failure or of saving loved ones from embarrassment for financial loss. However, it has also been stigmatized as a shameful, taboo subject.

In Kanagawa prefecture, just west of Tokyo, police said two women in their 20s had killed themselves in a car in what was believed to be another case of Internet suicide.

Cases dubbed by the Japanese media as "Internet suicide" pacts started to come to the fore in 2003. A total of 34 people killed themselves in such pacts last year, according to police data.
Police have asked Internet service providers to disclose information about those who post plans about suicides on the Web.

However, experts say it is pointless to blame the Internet and that a closer look should be taken at the society in which they occur.

Suicide rates have always been high in Japan, where there are about the same number each year as in the United States, which has more than double the population.

Last year, Japan reported a record 34,427 recorded cases of suicide. (Additional reporting by George Nishiyama)

© Reuters All Rights Reserved.

© Reuters 2004. All Rights Reserved.

Yorkshire slang guidebook for docs

2004-10-09T05:37:00.000-06:00

This is too wild!

Doctors Get Guide to Yorkshire Slang
Fri Oct 8, 7:19 AM ET

LONDON (Reuters) - Help is at hand for foreign doctors working in Yorkshire whose patients complain of sore "lugholes" or say they're feeling "jiggered" and can't stop "gipping".

Health officials in Doncaster, South Yorkshire have compiled a guide of local dialect and slang to help a group of seven Austrian doctors -- all fluent English speakers -- better understand their sometimes thickly accented patients.

"We recruited these doctors because of a shortage in Britain and though they all speak very good English they've struggled with the local dialect," health authority spokesman Ian Carpenter said on Friday.

"The guide includes some terms that are quite vulgar, but the doctors have found it very useful and it's also helped them integrate into life in the area," he added.

The Austrians, among the thousands of recent overseas recruits into Britain's National Health Service, will now know that "lugholes" are ears, feeling "jiggered" means exhausted and "gipping" is vomiting.

Other terms include "doofer" for penis, "tackle" for testicles and "popped his clogs" for dead.
"We're looking to hire more doctors from Spain so the guide will be all ready to help them too," Carpenter said.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=857&e=18&u=/nm/20041008/od_uk_nm/oukoe_odd_britain_doctors

1918 flu re-created!

2004-10-07T09:52:00.000-06:00

Scientists resurrect killer genes from 1918 flu pandemic
Wed Oct 6, 2:29 PM ET

PARIS (AFP) - Scientists working in top-security labs say they have recreated pathogens from the 1918 flu pandemic, the greatest plague of the 20th century, in a bid to find out why this strain was so extraordinarily lethal.

Using reverse genetic engineering, the US team took two key genes from the 1918 virus and slotted them into human flu viruses to which lab mice were known to be immune.

The two genes code for a spike-like molecule called haemagglutinin (HA), which binds to specific receptors on the surface of cells in the body, and another protein, neuraminidase (NA).

The mice were injected in the nose with the recombinant viruses.

Within three days, mice that had been exposed to the HA gene were mortally ill. Post-mortems showed the virus had rampaged through their lungs, producing inflammation and haemorrhaging characteristic of the symptoms induced by the 1918 outbreak.

At least 20 million and perhaps as many as 50 million people died in the 1918-1919 pandemic, the highest toll of any disease in the last century.

Scientists say that the disease leapt to humans by mutating from bird flu, possibly after passing through pigs, which are able to harbour both human and avian viruses and thus allow them to swap genes as the viruses reproduce.

For that reason, experts are deeply concerned that the avian flu that has broken out in poultry flocks in parts of Southeast Asia may acquire genes that will make it highly infectious as well as lethal for humans.

The researchers, led by Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, stress that the experiment is only conclusive for lab mice, not humans.

Nevertheless, they say, it adds strongly to suspicions that what made the type A 1918 virus strain so extraordinarily vicious was the unique profile of its HA gene.

That finding opens up good avenues for diagnostic tools for spotting emergent viruses with this genetic signature, thus tackling an outbreak in its early stages.

"Once the properties of the (1918) HA gene that gave rise to its lethal infectivity are better understood, it should be possible to devise effective control measures and to improve global surveillance networks for influenza viruses that pose the greatest threat to humans as well as other animal species," the authors say.

The study is published on Thursday in Nature, the British science weekly.

A previous study into the 1918 strain, published in Science in February, also pointed the finger at HA, theorising that only minor changes in its structure were needed for it to start binding with human cells as well as bird cells.

The latest research takes this a step forward, for it actually recreated the suspect gene and tested it on animals.

In order to prevent their creation from escaping into the open, Kawaoka's team carried out the genetic resurrection at a Biosafety Level Four facility -- the most secure level -- at the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg, Canada and at an "enhanced" Level Three lab at the University of Wisconsin.

By some estimates, the 1918 pandemic, called "Spanish flu" in the probably erroneous belief that it began in Spain, infected up to a billion people, which was half the world's population at the time.

The strain was especially lethal for healthy young adults, killing many of the World War I troops who had survived trench warfare, but leaving the very old and the very young -- the more usual victims of flu -- unscathed.

The reason for this is unclear. One theory is that the immune system reacts differently at various stages of life, and that young people may have been particularly vulnerable to an uncontrolled response by cytokines, the proteins that play a big role in causing inflammation.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1508&e=7&u=/afp/health_flu_biotech

Ethiopia demands treasure return

2004-10-05T16:45:00.000-06:00

I love Ethiopia...

Ethiopia Demands Looted Treasure Return

2 hours, 4 minutes agoBy ANTHONY MITCHELL, Associated Press Writer

ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia - British Prime Minister Tony Blair (news - web sites) is morally obligated to return to Ethiopia sacred objects and ancient artifacts looted by British troops more than a century ago, a leading scholar on Ethiopia said Tuesday.

Blair — scheduled to arrive in Ethiopia on Wednesday to explore new ways of helping Africa — should repatriate rare religious books and manuscripts and hundreds of other Ethiopian treasures, historian Richard Pankhurst told The Associated Press.

"Blair was not guilty of looting the treasures, but he is guilty of not returning them," said Pankhurst, who was honored this year by Queen Elizabeth II (news - web sites) for his services to advance Ethiopian studies.

British troops took many of the sacred objects and artifacts after annihilating the Ethiopian army at the Battle of Maqdala in 1868.

The most important items include a gold crown and chalice belonging to Emperor Tewodros II, some 350 manuscripts, 10 tabots or altar slabs, and religious crosses.

The British Library and British Museum, the Royal Library at Windsor Castle and the Victoria and Albert Museum hold most of the items. Britain's Royal family possesses six religious manuscripts, said to be the finest examples of Ethiopian manuscripts in the world.

The most valuable item is one of two copies of the Kebra Negast — or Glory of Kings — Ethiopia's holy book held in the British Library.

The 25-million-strong Ethiopian Orthodox Church and the nation's government have been pressuring Britain to return the items, which groups backing Ethiopia's claim value at $3 billion.
Britain says the items may be repatriated only through a parliamentary vote. However, others argue they could be returned on permanent loan without a vote.

Pankhurst said he will give Blair a letter calling for the return of the treasures.

"This looting was sacrilege in as much as it was looted from a church," said the 76-year-old historian, who has lived in the Horn of Africa nation for four decades.

During his three-day trip to Ethiopia, Blair is to attend the second session of his Commission for Africa in Addis Ababa. He has promised to focus on the plight of Africa and climate change during his chairmanship of the Group of Eight industrialized nations next year.

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20041005/ap_on_re_af/ethiopia_britain_artifacts_1

No accounting for taste

2004-10-05T05:21:00.000-06:00

This, coming from the man who felt Angelina Jolie wasn't good enough for him, the man who, along with Angelina's father, is responsible for her loathing and distrust of men, isn't surprising. After all, isn't Billy Bob the absolute apex of high culture and decent manners?

By SEAN HAMILTON
and DEREK BROWN

HOLLYWOOD star Billy Bob Thornton has created Much Ado in the acting world by branding William Shakespeare "bulls**t".

The heavily-tattooed American actor, 49, whose films include Bad Santa and Armageddon, launched an astonishing attack on the Bard.

He compared the legendary English playwright's work to corny soap operas.

He said: "I think Shakespeare's overrated. It's bulls**t. I'd never go and see a Shakespeare play. Who'd want to see me in Hamlet?

"Who cares? I don't know why actors do it. Shakespeare is just a bunch of soap operas.

"It's not that I don't understand it. But people think if you speak with an English accent it somehow makes you smarter.

"I don't believe in all the flowery language all of his plays are just a series of soap operas.

Billy Bob, who plays a foul-mouthed Father Christmas in the Santa comedy, likened works such as Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet to US daytime drama Days Of Our Lives.

His rant will infuriate classical acting fans like screen legend Al Pacino, who plays Shylock in a new film of The Merchant Of Venice.

Eccentric Billy Bob has famously been divorced five times, most recently from actress Angelina Jolie.

http://www.thesun.co.uk/article/0,,2-2004461322,00.html

Mexican volcano

2004-10-03T07:04:00.000-06:00

Mexico's 'Volcano of Fire' Spews Lava

Fri Oct 1, 2:27 PM ET

By GUILLERMO ARIAS, Associated Press Writer

YERBABUENA, Mexico - Western Mexico's "Volcano of Fire" unleashed a towering column of smoke and ash Friday, after ropes of burning, orange lava poured from its peak overnight.

A light coating of ash dusted nearby communities that are home to about 600 people. Authorities were on heightened alert but said they had no plans to order evacuations.

"The volcano is very active but has not yet reached a risk level that would prompt an evacuation," said Melchor Urzua, director of emergency response teams for Colima state.

Known in Spanish as "Volcan del Fuego," the 12,533-foot-high mountain straddles the border of Colima and Jalisco states, 300 miles west of Mexico City.

Earthquakes (news - web sites) and explosions of hot rock within the volcano began Wednesday, provoked by the collapse of a dome that formed recently in its center. Small landslides tumbled down the volcano's northern and western slopes. Lava flowed Thursday night and early Friday morning.

"The incandescent material won't affect nearby communities because it's running off into valleys," said Jorge Sapien, a spokesman for Jalisco emergency teams.

A major eruption in 1999 sent glowing rock three miles down its slopes and fired a plume of ash more than 5 miles high.

In 1913, an explosion created a crater 1,650 feet deep, blasted fast-moving flows of hot ash down the volcano's slopes and rained ash on Guadalajara, 75 miles to the north.

Vulcanologists consider the Colima volcano to be one of the most active and potentially the most destructive in central Mexico.

It has erupted violently dozens of times since its first recorded eruption in 1560.

World Cup and magic?

2004-10-02T06:25:00.000-06:00

Now this is kinda cool (http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=573&u=/nm/20041001/od_nm/odd_safrica_witchcraft_dc&printer=1):

Did Magic Clinch 2010 World Cup Bid?

Fri Oct 1,10:17 AM ET

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - A South African traditional healer says she and her dead ancestors played a key role in winning South Africa the 2010 World Cup bid, but organizers short-changed her, a newspaper reported Friday.

Anna Nxumalo, a traditional healer who lives east of Johannesburg, told the Star newspaper officials from the South African Football Association visited her a few days before the results of the 2010 World Cup bid were announced.

"They asked me to predict if South Africa would win the bid," she said. "I threw the bones and spoke to my ancestors. They told me we would win."

Traditional healers say that asking for a prediction is much the same as asking for something to happen, the paper says.

SAFA President Molefi Oliphant said he was surprised and shocked by the suggestion. As far as he knew, no one at SAFA had consulted a healer about the bid, he said.

SAFA has offered 7.5 million rand ($1.16 million) bonuses to the three South African soccer officials who helped secure the bid. Traditional healing organizations say Nxumalo deserves more than the 50 rand ($7.72) she says received for her services.

Kewl

2004-10-02T05:58:00.000-06:00

I love volcanoes! I have a pendant of helenite, born on May 18, 1980 when Mount St. Helens first blew, and I've been following the latest stirrings there pretty closely. From this morning's CNN.com:

VANCOUVER, Washington (CNN) -- Scientists are closely watching Mount St. Helens after a small eruption spewed smoke and ash thousands of feet Friday before another earthquake rattled the volcano.

A series of small earthquakes was detected in the week before the Friday afternoon's eruption. This seismic activity decreased shortly after the noon (3 p.m. ET) eruption, but picked up again within hours.

Peter Frenzen, a scientist with the Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument, said a 2.0 magnitude earthquake was detected.

One scientist described the eruption as a "hiccup."

The volcano spewed a harmless plume of steam and ash into the air Friday, the biggest eruption by the volcano in 18 years.

A small explosion was detected on the south side of the volcano's lava dome, where cracks had been detected in a glacier, said John Major of the U.S. Geological Survey.

The mountain then vented a combination of steam and ash for 24 minutes, sending a pale gray column nearly 10,000 feet into the blue Washington sky.

"There is no indication that magma has reached the surface," Major said.

Molten rock is called magma before reaching the surface where it then becomes lava.

Scientists said the presence of magma could indicate the potential for a more serious eruption.

Geologist Tom Pierson said the event "was really a hiccup. [Eruptions] could be a little bigger once real magma is involved."

A visible plume -- which was mostly steam but contained some ash -- moved southwest about six miles, Major said.

The Portland, Oregon, metropolitan area lies about 50 miles southwest of Mount St. Helens.

The water flow out of the crater appears to have increased since the eruption, though no potentially destructive mud flows were reported, he said.

Scientists saw this coming

Scientists had been predicting just such a minor eruption after swarms of small earthquakes were detected and the mountain's volcanic dome shifted three inches since Monday.

"This is exactly the kind of event that we've sort of been talking about and anticipating over the past several days. This is a fairly small eruption," Major said.

In anticipation of an eruption, the mountain was closed to hikers, and the media and sightseers gathered at a visitors center five miles away.

Major said none of the scientists working on the volcano at the time of the eruption were injured.

Friday's eruption was a mere sideshow in comparison to the cataclysmic eruption May 18, 1980, which blew off more than 1,000 feet from the top of the mountain.

That eruption killed 57 people, left deep piles of ash hundreds of miles away and caused $3 billion in damage.

After that disaster, small eruptions continued at Mount St. Helens until 1986, when the volcano finally went quiet. Major said Friday's eruption was comparable to the minor eruptions seen during that period.

The lava dome was built up inside the crater left by the 1980 eruption by the smaller eruptions that followed it.

Found, after 500 years

2004-10-01T08:33:00.000-06:00

Stolen page found after 500 years

Thu Sep 30, 7:33 AM ET

LONDON (Reuters) - A page stolen more than 500 years ago from a celebrated Italian book of prayers has finally been recovered, the British Library says.

Reuters Photo

The illuminated page depicting the occupations of the month of October comes from the Sforza Book of Hours, one of the most lavish books of the Italian Renaissance and a treasured item in the national library's collection.

The devotional book, measuring 9 by 13 centimetres, was commissioned about 1490 for the widow of the Duke of Milan.

But before it had even been completed, some of the main illustrated pages were stolen from the workshop of the artist, Giovan Pietro Birago, a contemporary of Leonardo da Vinci.

The book was presented to the British Museum in 1893, and passed to the British Library after its creation in 1973.

The stolen pages were regarded as completely lost until one reached the Museum in 1941. The Library acquired another page, showing the month of May, in 1984, after it was sold by New York dealer and collector Bernard Breslauer.

It was assumed then that no more pages would emerge, but Breslauer had another page, a fact which did not emerge until it he offered it this year to the Library.

With support from the National Art Collections Fund and the Friends of the National Libraries groups, this last page was bought for 191,000 pounds and presented to the British Library.

It is likely to be the last of the missing pages to be recovered, said Scot McKendrick, the library's Head of Medieval and Earlier Manuscripts.

"Given the fame of the book, I'd be pretty astounded if anything else now re-emerged," he told Reuters.

I want one of each!

2004-10-01T08:28:00.000-06:00

LOL, okay, so the Christmas catalog from Neiman Marcus will set me back $15.00, but I have to have one. And then I'm gonna order one of everything ;)

Oddly Enough - Reuters

All I Want for Christmas Is a $10 Million Zeppelin
Wed Sep 29,10:57 AM ET
By Jon Herskovitz
DALLAS (Reuters) - Baby Boomers, this Christmas season unleash your inner child and empty your bankbook with jewel-encrusted Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head toys at $16,000 a pair.

Retailer Neiman Marcus on Tuesday rolled out its annual parade of seasonal excess and eccentricity in its Christmas Book, which is chock full of luxury gifts that harken to the childhood joys of years past.

For those who pedaled a Big Wheel tricycle, there is the high-powered "Las Vegas Trike" -- a $65,000, three-wheel motorcycle with a long and mean profile, a thundering 330-horsepower engine and a paint style dubbed chameleon because it changes color in varying lights.

Fans of the Jules Verne novel "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" can travel 1,500 feet under the sea in their own personal submarine dubbed an "Underwater Aviator" for its airplane-like shape, with wings that maximize speed and maneuverability. Oh, the price is $1.7 million.
The air ships of yesteryear can be had today, for a tidy $10 million. The Zeppelin company is offering an 8-ton sky gem that seats up to 12 and can fly slow and low for 24 hours.

"This is an adventure ship," said Zeppelin spokesman Ron Hochstetler. "A private jet can whisk you from here today while you are above it all, but in a Zeppelin you can actually stop and smell the flowers along the way."

Fantasy camps are alive and well in the catalog, but they come with a grown-up twist.
For women, there is a haute couture adventure with designer Valentino for $325,000 that ends with a one-of-a-kind gown hand-crafted for the purchaser. There are stops along the way in Paris for fittings with the designer, nights in a luxury hotel and hobnobbing with the high-fashion set.

Country music fans can buy a Grand Ole Opry experience for a mere $25,000 that includes music performances, an autographed guitar and a pair of matching jackets with enough sparkle to catch the eye of everyone in Nashville.

Those who loved the legend of King Arthur as a kid can purchase a custom-made suit of armor for $20,000, and there is a souped-up go-cart for little boys up to 250 pounds is $800.
Some of the less pricey items in the catalog are a holder for sugar packets for $20.

The family fun gift of the season is 5,000-square-foot bowling center with four lanes, a high-tech monitor and scoring system, personalized bowling shirts, and lessons from pros for $1.45 million.

Links to Dr Who scarf instructions

2004-09-27T17:46:00.000-06:00

I haven't actually tried either of these, but since I can't find my original instructions from forever ago, these'll have to do:

http://users.ox.ac.uk/~quee1230/personal/drwhoscarf.html

http://www.dustbunnies.com/Crochet/DrWhoScarf.htm

Chandira

2004-09-27T17:43:00.000-06:00

LOL, I have always adored the good Dr, and I had the biggest crush on both Tom Baker and Peter Davison (yeah, a crush on Tom Baker, go flipping figure...)

Have you ever tried to knit the scarf? I should post links to sites that have the knitting directions...

Diamond heist!

2004-09-27T17:41:00.000-06:00

I have always loved "capers" like "A Fish Called Wanda" and "Oceans Eleven," so today's Louvre news is right up my alley ;) Found on AOL News.

Updated: 02:42 PM EDT
Huge Diamond Heist at Louvre
Gems Worth More Than $13 Million

PARIS (Sept. 27) - Two diamonds together worth over 11 million euros ($13.53 million) disappeared from an antique dealers' show at Paris's Louvre museum on Monday in an apparent robbery while the person manning the stand was absent.
Police said a glass case holding the jewels was forced open in mid-afternoon during the show. One was a white diamond of 47 carats estimated at 6 million euros and the other a blue diamond of 15.74 carats worth 5.5 million.
"There was neither any alarm system nor any surveillance camera," a police spokesman said. The employee of the jewelry shop displaying the diamonds was apparently absent for about 15 minutes, he said.
The diamonds were on show in a hall in the underground shopping arcade at the Louvre, outside the museum's art galleries.
09/27/04 14:31 ET
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The Zero Room

2004-09-27T12:28:00.000-06:00

Any Doctor Who fans out there? If so, and if you wander by, you'll instantly recognize both the name and the essential function of this sister blog of mine, sibling to my The Sanity Ranch blog wherein I plan to be a virulent partisan ranter for decades to come.

This new blog of mine will function for me the same way Doctor Who's Zero Room functions for him--a place to recuperate, a place to heal, a place to explore issues within my own mind that maybe have no place on a political blog. Oh, and a place to vent when the whole political game gets too much for me.

And my Zero Room is, of course, filled with the scent of roses. Ahhhh, peace...