Oddities and Humor

We don't need no steenking jihad kitty. Now, jihad turtle would have been something else - a foe for the Mutant Ninja Turtles.

"shoppers at the the Macy's in Philadelphia (the old Wanamaker building) were surprised when over 600 choristers who were there mingling with regular shoppers suddenly burst into Handel's Hallelujah Chorus. It's pretty awesome."

Fabulous, Ceili. I would have joined in as well, had I been there.

Inspired by you, I found this oddity and it made me smile.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOdHleXmff0&feature=related

That was great ceili

That was a great one, too letty.

On screen, Dick Van Dyke has been rescued from untimely death by flying cars and magical nannies. Off screen, the veteran star of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Mary Poppins had to rely on the help of a pod of porpoises after apparently dozing off aboard his surfboard. "I'm not kidding," he said afterwards.

Van Dyke's ordeal began during an ill-fated trip to his local beach. "I woke up out of sight of land," the 84-year-old actor told reporters. "I started paddling with the swells and I started seeing fins swimming around me and I thought 'I'm dead!'"

Van Dyke was wrong. "They turned out to be porpoises," he said. "And they pushed me all the way to shore." The porpoises were unavailable for comment.

Van Dyke made his screen debut on the Phil Silvers Show before bagging his own TV sitcom in 1961. His film credits include Bye Bye Birdie, Mary Poppins, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Dick Tracy, while his TV drama Diagnosis: Murder ran from 1993 to 2001. In recent years he has appeared on screen in Night at the Museum and its 2009 sequel.

Americans Are Wary Of Genetically Engineered Foods
www.npr.org
Only 25 percent of Americans are completely sure they understand genetically engineered food. Nearly two-thirds are uncertain about its safety. A majority are willing to eat genetically modified plants, but only about a third would try altered fish...

How long is a dog's memory? My 8 year old dog buried two very big bones in the yard. Hid them so well I could not find them, despite looking daily for over a week. The first burial has got to date back a year and a half. The second, one year. So, a few days back, she dug up the second and yesterday dug up the first. If I had not seen it I would have trouble believing it.

Techworld —
A New York couple have been charged with defrauding a wealthy musician to the tune of $20 million (£12.3 million) after he innocently visited their computer servicing company to have a virus removed from his laptop.

The hard-to-believe story started in 2004 when moneyed pianist Roger Davidson asked Mount Kisco computer store owners Vickram Bedi, 36, and his Icelandic girlfriend Helga Invarsdottir, 39, to rid his computer of a virus.

On learning of Davidson's wealth, the pair are alleged to have concocted an elaborate social engineering scam that defrauded him of somewhere between the $6 million the police have been able to confirm with an upper figure of as much as $20 million.

Exactly how they executed the fraud reads like something out of an implausible movie plot.

According to police, the pair were able to convince Davidson that the virus was in fact a symptom of a much larger plot in which he was being menaced by government intelligence agencies, foreign nationals and even priests associated with Catholic organisation, Opus Dei.

So convinced was the victim he is said to have agreed to pay the pair $160,000 per month for 24-hour protection against the fictitious threats, payments which continued until recently.

As book readers will recall, Opus Dei were central to the fanciful plot of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, later made into a high-profile film.

"The suspects were isolating the victim and were basically trying to control every dollar that he had," said Police Chief Anthony Marraccini. "They did it very systematically and infiltrated every aspect of his life. It was almost a brainwashing technique."

Westchester County District Attorney Janet DiFiore concurred.

"These two defendants preyed upon, duped and exploited the fears of this victim with cold calculation and callousness. The systematic method with which they continued the larceny over a period of more than six years is nothing short of heartless," she said.

If convicted, the couple could spend between 8 and 25 years in prison.

Unlikely frauds of this kind are not unheard of. Two years ago, a reverend in Oregon was warned to stop transferring money to Nigerian 419 scammers after giving them $400,000 in compulsively gullible acts.



» posted by ITworld staff

PULLMAN, Wash. — Invoking the spirit of "Star Trek" in a scholarly article entitled "To Boldly Go," two scientists contend human travel to Mars could happen much more quickly and cheaply if the missions are made one-way. They argue that it would be little different from early settlers to North America, who left Europe with little expectation of return.

"The main point is to get Mars exploration moving," said Dirk Schulze-Makuch of Washington State University, who wrote the article in the latest "Journal of Cosmology" with Paul Davies of Arizona State University. The colleagues state — in one of 55 articles in the issue devoted to exploring Mars — that humans must begin colonizing another planet as a hedge against a catastrophe on Earth.

Mars is a six-month flight away, possesses surface gravity, an atmosphere, abundant water, carbon dioxide and essential minerals. They propose the missions start by sending two two-person teams, in separate ships, to Mars. More colonists and regular supply ships would follow.

The technology already exists, or is within easy reach, they wrote.

An official for NASA said the space agency envisions manned missions to Mars in the next few decades, but that the planning decidedly involves round trips.

President Obama informed NASA last April that he "'believed by the mid-2030s that we could send humans to orbit Mars and safely return them to Earth. And that a landing would soon follow,'" said agency spokesman Michael Braukus.

No where did Obama suggest the astronauts be left behind.

"We want our people back," Braukus said.

Retired Apollo 14 astronaut Ed Mitchell, who walked on the Moon, was also critical of the one-way idea.

"This is premature," Mitchell wrote in an e-mail. "We aren't ready for this yet."

Davies and Schulze-Makuch say it's important to realize they're not proposing a "suicide mission."

"The astronauts would go to Mars with the intention of staying for the rest of their lives, as trailblazers of a permanent human Mars colony," they wrote, while acknowledging the proposal is a tough sell for NASA, with its intense focus on safety.

They think the private sector might be a better place to try their plan.

"What we would need is an eccentric billionaire," Schulze-Makuch said. "There are people who have the money to put this into reality."

From the private sector
Indeed, British tycoon Richard Branson, PayPal founder Elon Musk and Amazon.com Inc. CEO Jeff Bezos are among the rich who are involved in private space ventures.

Isolated humans in space have long been a staple of science fiction movies, from "Robinson Crusoe on Mars" to "2001: A Space Odyssey" to a flurry of recent movies such as "Solaris" and "Moon." In many of the plots, the lonely astronauts fall victim to computers, madness or aliens.

Psychological profiling and training of the astronauts, plus constant communication with Earth, will reduce debilitating mental strains, the two scientists said.

"They would in fact feel more connected to home than the early Antarctic explorers," according to the article.

But the mental health of humans who spent time in space has been extensively studied. Depression can set in, people become irritated with each other, and sleep can be disrupted, the studies have found. The knowledge that there is no quick return to Earth would likely make that worse.

Davies is a physicist whose research focuses on cosmology, quantum field theory, and astrobiology. He was an early proponent of the theory that life on Earth may have come from Mars in rocks ejected by asteroid and comet impacts.

Schulze-Makuch works in the Earth Sciences department at WSU and is the author of two books about life on other planets. His focus is eco-hydrogeology, which includes the study of water on planets and moons of our solar system and how those could serve as a potential habitat for microbial life.

The peer-reviewed Journal of Cosmology covers astronomy, astrobiology, Earth sciences and life.

Schulze-Makuch and Davies contend that Mars has abundant resources to help the colonists become self-sufficient over time. The colony should be next to a large ice cave, to provide shelter from radiation, plus water and oxygen, they wrote.

They believe the one-way trips could start in two decades.

"You would send a little bit older folks, around 60 or something like that," Schulze-Makuch said, bringing to mind the aging heroes who save the day in Space Cowboys.

Turning 78 on Mars
That's because the mission would undoubtedly reduce a person's lifespan, from a lack of medical care and exposure to radiation. That radiation would also damage human reproductive organs, so sending people of childbearing age is not a good idea, he said.

There have been seniors in space, including John Glenn, who was 77 when he flew on the space shuttle in 1998.

Still, Schulze-Makuch believes many people would be willing to make the sacrifice.

The Mars base would offer humanity a "lifeboat" in the event Earth becomes uninhabitable, they said.

"We are on a vulnerable planet," Schulze-Makuch said. "Asteroid impact can threaten us, or a supernova explosion. If we want to survive as a species, we have to expand into the solar system and likely beyond."

strange one all right, edgar. Even The Discovery launch is postponed until next year.

Here's another one. Buddy Holly and one....



Crickets are often kept as pets in Asian countries because their chirping is considered beautiful and soothing. It is said that they are also something of a burglar alarm. Once they are accustomed to members of the household, they will continue to chirp, stopping only when a stranger enters the room.

Keeping crickets is a simple matter. Catching them can be more difficult. You want to catch common field crickets, Acheta assimilis , which are abundant across most of North America. If you live elsewhere in the world, your local garden variety cricket should do the trick. The males are the ones that sing. You can easily tell the difference due to the female's long egg laying "tail", or ovipositor, which they use to lay eggs under the surface of soil.

Now the humor.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOZzNOkcEgM

Psst - In his book, Collodi has Pinocchio smash the unnamed cricket early on.

I knew crickets were kept, but not that they were like watchdogs. I do recall the Lone Ranger telling Tonto the crickets were silent, meaning there was somebody approaching.

I wonder if the nose knows..

Space man brings human race artificial kidney, said the SF Chronicle photo caption on its home web page

That would be neat. My mother in law has just one kidney left and it gets stones.

Due to the continuing drought, our part of the country is under a burn ban. Right now, the firemen and the cops are cruising the neighborhood, one block at a time, because there is smoke in the air. This is one little spot people live to make fires in the yard. You might get a beautiful sunny day, but you feel reluctant to go out of doors, because the smoke chokes you.

It was that way when I lived in the San Juaquin valley near STockton California. It was a real shithole and to top it off it smelled like a dump fire all the time. The farmers were forever biurning their rice fields and when the month of November arrived, all this smoke began to nucleate around water droplets and we had this really shitty smoky fog that lasted till past Christmas.
Thats why Californians are mostly batshit.

Im still not right in the head

It's a compulsion with many to find every burnable item and torch it. Personally, I don't rake and I don't burn.

Real men mulch their leaves Edgar, we mulch.

I mow over that **** and pretty soon I don't see it any more.