Oddities and Humor

The ag college I used to play footbal with had a dried bulls pizzel as a mascot.
Name of Harold.
Harold was used as a ceremonial tool in the induction and naming ceremony of new students.

Fred Nurk welcome to Rivcoll. I dub thee Scarrifier (or other suitable or unsuitable agricultural term).

Don't know why, edgar, but that made me smile. Love it!

The Asian Unicorn.



'Asian unicorn' spotted for first time in a decade

One of the world's rarest animals, the saola, known as the ''Asian unicorn'', has been sighted for the first time in more than a decade. It was captured but died.

Now a bit of humor.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_v5IzX-Lu8

I don't know, letty. That saola has more horns than I associate with a unicorn.
I appreciate the Thurber story. The man doing the reading was spot on.

How close to the train tracks can you put your farmer's market? Wrong. Closer.

EEEEGADS! Someone here must have won themselves or eventually win themselves a Darwin Award.

Some great stuff on here, yawl.

The Odd Couple



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2oYOvx8lTY

Letty, This did my heart good. Thanks for sharing.

I watched your video earlier, letty. It is easier to see how humans domesticated animals after seeing how freely different species can bond.

Two days before a west Houston bank heist, a 19-year-old bank teller named Estefany Martinez posted a cryptic status update on her Facebook page: "Get $$$."

It would take a little over a week and a Crime Stoppers tip before investigators unraveled the plot twist behind the March 23 robbery of the International Bank of Commerce on Eldridge Parkway.

What looked on surveillance video to be a classic bank robbery — with armed, masked suspects and terrorized bank tellers — turned out to be an amateurish inside job, allegedly orchestrated by two 19-year-old tellers with the help of a boyfriend and an older brother.

Using an incriminating trail of Facebook posts left by Martinez and her 18-year-old boyfriend, Ricky "Ricko Gee" Gonzalez, detectives arrested four suspects this week on bank theft charges, alleging they made off with $62,000.

Their Facebook pages held not-so-subtle clues: Two days after the robbery, Martinez posted: "IM RICH …" followed by a rhyming expletive.

"WIPE MY TEETH WITH HUNDEREDS …" her boyfriend allegedly posted the day after the heist. He also boasted of wiping another part of his anatomy with $50 bills.

A lesson to be learned
An attorney for Martinez, Richard Kuniansky, described his client as "young and immature," suggesting there is a lesson in her current predicament.

"I've always heard that you shouldn't post pictures of yourself on Facebook smoking pot or drinking because employers are now looking at Facebook pages," he said. "But I never knew there should be a warning not to post about a bank robbery that's been committed."

The Facebook posts by Martinez and Gonzalez about the bank heist were part of a criminal complaint unsealed in Houston federal court this week.

Authorities allege Martinez and teller Anna Margarita Rivera started planning the bank heist at 1545 Eldridge Parkway about a month in advance. Rivera told investigators that she was working at the same bank during a robbery on Nov. 17 and "believed staging the robbery would be easy" since she'd never heard of anyone being arrested in connection with that theft.

Martinez enlisted Gonzalez, and Rivera recruited her brother, 22-year-old Arturo Solano, according to the complaint.

The tellers told investigators that they made sure they were the only ones working during the robbery. Wearing plastic masks purchased from a dollar store, Gonzalez and Solano entered the bank about 5:45 p.m. and jumped over the teller counter, demanding money, according to investigators. While one suspect cleaned out the cash drawers, the other took Martinez and Rivera to the vault.

Martinez and Rivera took steps to make the robbery look legitimate. They included tracking devices in the money bags, instructing Gonzalez and Solano to ditch them right away, investigators said. One of the suspects left behind his gun, which turned out to be plastic.

'Trying to be funny'
The celebratory Facebook posts started shortly after they divided the loot at Rivera's apartment, officials say.

"U HAVE TO PAST THE LINE SOMETIMES!! TO GET DIS MONEY!!" Gonzalez posted on his Facebook page the day after the theft.

Lance Craig Hamm, an attorney for Gonzalez, said his client was not talking about the robbery on his Facebook page. "He literally was just talking, trying to have fun, trying to be funny," Hamm said.

Two days after the heist, Martinez posted about being "RICH." Kuniansky said Martinez is a single mother and had plans to go to college. Now she faces up to 10 years in prison, he said.

An attorney for Rivera could not be reached for comment. No attorney was listed in federal court records for Solano.

A Facebook page for "Ricko Gee" Gonzalez of Houston was still up as of Thursday evening. Under employer, it read: "Make money both ways Dirty and Clean!!

Law enforcement tool
It's not just tech-savvy, big-city types like the FBI-led Houston Area Bank Robbery Task Force that use Facebook as a law enforcement tool. In March, Texas Parks and Wildlife Game wardens used it to track down the killer of an 11½-foot alligator in Bastrop County.

Andy Kahan, the city of Houston's crime victim advocate, said he was tipped off about a Facebook page on which a probationer, who wasn't supposed to be drinking, posted photos of himself holding bottles of liquor and beer and an open invitation to a party featuring "trash can punch."

One post read: "Probation on the 23rd - party's gotta be moved - sorry folks. On the upside, that just means more time to plan."

Kahan said he contacted the probation department and said: "I've got a gift-wrapped delivery for you."

susan.carroll@ chron.com

If Anthony Garcia wasn't regretting that huge tattoo inked across his chest before, he sure must be now. That's because it was the Los Angeles gangster's body art that tipped off law enforcement to his role in an unsolved murder--and ultimately helped lead to his conviction. In short, as Los Angeles Times reporter Robert Faturechi notes, Garcia drew cops a map of the crime scene--on himself.

In 2008, Kevin Lloyd, a homicide investigator with the L.A. County Sheriff's office, was looking through photos of tattoed gang members, when he came across Garcia's (above). Garcia had recently been picked up on a routine traffic stop and soon released, but the image on his chest caught Lloyd's attention.

Back in 2004, Lloyd had been working as a sergeant at the Pico Rivera station when he was called to the scene of a shooting outside a liquor store, in which 23-year-old John Juarez was gunned down. The murder was never solved.

But Lloyd quickly realized that the tattoo on Garcia's chest showed the scene. It wasn't just the image of the liquor store itself. It was the artistic details: the Christmas lights on the roof; the street lamp in the corner; and the murder victim depicted as a peanut, which is a gang terminology for a rival gang member. And above it all was a banner reading "Rivera Kills"—a reference to the Rivera-13 gang.

Lloyd and his colleagues soon found Garcia and arrested him. Then, a detective posing as another gang member was placed in Garcia's jail cell--and soon got him talking. Before long, Garcia was bragging about the liquor store shooting--unaware that the undercover detective was recording him.

That recording would later be played for a jury, which convicted Garcia of the murder.

It's not unusal for gang members to get tattoos that reference events in their lives--either symbolically or literally--as a way to impress their peers. But Homicide Lt. Dave Dolson said a tattoo that actually laid out its owner's involvement in an unsolved murder was something new.

"I haven't seen it before, and I haven't heard of anything like it either," Dolson told the paper.

Captain Mike Parker said cops had Garcia himself to thank for wrapping the case up. "Think about it," Parker said. "He tattooed his confession on his chest. You have a degree of fate with this."

(Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department)

That is odd, edgar, but justice has once again prevailed.

You sent me searching again.

Andy Garcia.



I have been reading about Endangered Places Around the World.

Here is one of them.



More info here.

http://www.oceandots.com/pacific/tuvalu/

23 April 2011 Last updated at 12:00 ET

Llandudno woman catches Florida balcony fall baby

A woman from Llandudno has been called "an angel sent from heaven" after she caught a 16-month-old baby who fell from a hotel balcony in Florida.

Jah-Nea Myles, apparently slipped through the balcony railing and fell 40ft (12m) into the arms of Helen Beard, who saved the girl from injury.

Ms Beard, 44, who lives in Worksop, was at the Orland hotel's pool when she saw the baby hanging from railings.

Ms Beard has been awarded a medal of merit by Florida police.

Ms Beard, a former pupil at Ysgol John Bright and a Cardiff University graduate, is on holiday in the US with partner Philip Charlesworth and 10-year-old son Ben.

The drama happened at the Econo Lodge hotel

Her mother, Ann Beard, from Llandudno, said: "We're so proud. Her reactions must have been so quick.

"If anything had gone wrong it just doesn't bear thinking about.

"It was in the late evening and she just happened to be in the right place."

The first Ms Beard's parents knew of the drama was in an e-mail from their daughter saying: "A little girl aged two fell from her fourth-floor balcony and I caught her."

Ms Beard has a senior post with Doncaster's health authority.

Parents Michael, 73, a retired businessman, and Ann received messages from friends and family praising their daughter's reactions.

Her father said: "If she had missed the baby they would have been home on the next flight."

Ms Beard held the child until emergency medical workers arrived.

'Not a scratch'

The toddler was taken to hospital, where medical staff said they saw no bruises or scratches and deemed her in good health.

An investigator with the Orange County sheriff's office described her as "playful" and said she was not crying.

Helena Myles, Jah-Nea's 20-year-old mother, told police her friend was watching the baby in an adjacent hotel room.

Ms Holt, 21, said she went to the bathroom about 2100 local time (0100 GMT), then heard screaming and saw the balcony door ajar.

She ran out onto the balcony and saw the baby in the arms of Ms Beard.

Ms Myles told Reuters: "She's perfectly fine. Not a scratch on her body.

"I'm thanking the Lord above right now for saving my child's life. I'm also thanking that lady because she was an angel sent from heaven."

Police said no criminal charges were pending.


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-north-west-wales-13175183

I used to daydream about living on those kind of islands, letty. But I am a city boy who needs what he needs now, not when the monthly delivery plane or ship arrives.

Punky the Dog loves my banana trees.

You got banana trees? Does the fruit get very big?

The fruit is very small. It only develops on the trees that survive three years in a row without freezing. Then the winter kills them before they develop enough to get ripe.

There were some major power outages in Texas City today. Shut down some refineries. Turns out the drought has allowed corrosive salt to settle on the power lines. The best remedy for it is rain, of which we no longer get any. Fire trucks are being deployed to wash the lines.

Could Mother Nature perhaps be Mexican and that Texas' attempt to stop illegal immigration from the south stop Mother Nature be too effective that it keeps Mother Nature from performing her job of bringing much needed rain to the state?

I saw Mother Nature on television. She appears to be Scandinavian. No, I don't buy your theory.