Bear comes to a sticky end

It seems it's not only the American Police force that has a taste for sticky cakes and buns.

A hunter in the American state of Pennsylvania has been fined nearly $7,000 for luring a bear to a sticky end with a trail of donuts.

Charles Olsen enticed the large black bear into his gun sights with pastries and illegally shot it, police said.

Mr Olsen attracted the attention of the Game Commission when his truck, laden with sugary treats, was spotted on a road a week before bear season.
The "pastry poacher" was found guilty of violating several game laws.

Mr Olsen was arrested last November when he attempted to register the bear, which weighed 707 lbs (a third of a ton), the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported.
It would have been the biggest trophy claimed during the state's three-day bear hunting season had it been killed legally, the newspaper said.

The 39-year-old, of Wilkes-Barre, Luzerne County, was rumbled when a Game Commission wildlife conservation officer spotted his truck loaded with pastries from a local shop and traced the license number.

The officer, Cory Bentzoni said: "Being that we were so close to bear season, seeing that person drive by with an unusual amount of pastries was like watching an individual go down a row of parked vehicles testing each handle to see if it would open.

"Something just didn't seem right," he was quoted as saying.
Mr Olsen could also lose his hunting and trapping privileges for at least three years after Thursday's hearing, it is reported.

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Sony Get Stroppy Over Floppy

Sony has said it will stop making floppy disks, after nearly three decades of manufacture. Yet millions of them are still being bought every year.

The floppy disk is the original symbol of storage; when you want to save a file, you go looking for that little icon that looks like a floppy.

Every year another computer manufacturer stops putting floppy drives in its machines, or a retailer stops selling the disks. Each time the cry goes up that the death knell has been sounded for the floppy disk.

However, Verbatim, a UK manufacturer which makes more than a quarter of the floppies sold in the UK, says it sells hundreds of thousands of them a month. It sells millions more in Europe.

"We've been discussing the death of the floppy for 14 years, ever since CD technology first started coming on strong," says Verbatim spokesman Kevin Jefcoate.

Yet what was Sony's best-selling peripheral for its computers in recent years? The 3.5-inch floppy disk drive that connects via a USB cable.

Somewhere out there, the floppy disk is alive and well. But where?

Disk-credited

The truth is the 3½-inch, 1.44 megabyte floppy - the disk that made it big - has always defied logic. It's not floppy for a start. The term was a hangover from its precursor, the 5¼-inch floppy, which had a definite lack of rigidness about it. However, its smaller successor held 15 times as much data.

But then along came the CD-ROM, and then the USB flash drive shamed them both; the most voluminous USB stick - which could pass for a keyring - can now hold nearly 90,000 floppies' worth of data.

One might be tempted to think that, like the vinyl enthusiasts who insist music sounds "warmer" on a record, the floppy has its own fan club. But unlike the case of vinyl, a digital format of a floppy is no different than that found on your hard drive or USB stick.

Given their limited size and speed of data transfer, along with their increasing obsolescence, it's harder to find a floppy fan club than it is to find a laptop with a floppy drive built in.

But what about all the second-hand computers that are donated to the developing world? Could they be even partly responsible for the thousands of disks still sold?

Anja Ffrench of Computer Aid International - the largest charity working to distribute recycled IT to Africa and South America - says that they only deal in computers from 2002 and later, meaning that they'll have the USB connection that obviates the need for floppies.

There are a few instances for which floppies remain the norm, like the specialist, high-value technology that may rely on floppy drives for data.

The vast desks that control the light shows and sounds settings in theatres or music venues have until recently come with floppy drives as standard; the English National Opera is just one example of an organisation that uses them.

A volunteer at the National Museum of Computing says that many scientific instruments - so-called dataloggers, oscilloscopes and the like - record their data onto floppies.

This kind of expensive equipment is made to last, to be bought infrequently - and these gadgets may call for at least a few floppies in their lifetimes.

But these relatively niche uses couldn't possibly account for the number of floppies - something like a million a month - that are being consumed in the UK alone.

The answer may simply be that there are a great many old computers that read only floppies, and a great many computer users that have no need for the storage media that have supplanted them in other quarters.

Rather than there being one industry propped up on the values of a floppy, or a horde of enthusiasts buying up the world's supply, they may simply be as much as many computer users need.

"Old habits die hard, I guess," said John Delaney, research director for IT analysts IDC.

"If you've been using PCs for a long time and you don't do much in the way of photography or music with them, then why would you change?

"There are people who ride technology for as long as it can be ridden without falling over."



Barry Eva (Storyheart)

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Disney hint for future happy meal gifts

Disney has announced some of its plans for films over the next few years, or should we say, what your children will be demanding you buy clothes and toys, while you just know burger stores will have items in their children’s happy meals.
Coming out in 2012 will be an animated follow up to Pixar’s 2001 hit “Monsters Inc” which featuring the voices of Billy Crystal and John Goodman made more than $525m wordwide.

Another Pixar film The Bear and the Bow, is to be renamed Brave and have its release put back to the end of 2011.

For those who can remember the world of Kermit, Miss Piggy etc, Disney is also going to make a new Muppets movie, to be directed by Flight of the Conchords creator James Bobin, will introduce a new puppet character called Walter.

Other future projects from Disney-Pixar include a retelling of the Winnie the Pooh story using hand-drawn animation and Frankenweenie, a stop-motion cartoon based on a story by Tim Burton.

Before that Pixar will release Toy Story 3 this summer, with a Cars sequel due in cinemas next year.

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From Victoria Cross to Wyatt Earp

Today sees two historic peices of weird news.

The first Victoria Cross to be won by a British army soldier - along with the cannonball which blew off his arm - has fetched £252,000 at auction.

The medal, which is Britain's highest military award for valour, was given to Glasgow-born Major John Simpson Knox.

It was for acts of heroism between 1854 and 1855 during the Crimean War.

The medal and cannonball, which took off part of Major Knox's left arm, went under the hammer at Spink Auctioneers in London.

A fellow soldier had picked up the missile that hit Major Knox and later gave it to him.

Major Knox, who was born in 1828, ran away from home in Glasgow at 14 and illegally joined the Scots Fusilier Guards as he was under age.

By the time the Crimean War had begun in 1854 he was an acting sergeant major.
He performed the first of two acts of valour on 20 September 1854 during the Battle of the River Alma.

According to the citation for his medal, he "acted with conspicuous courage in reforming the ranks of the Guards at a decisive moment of the action".

The second act of valour occurred in June the following year.

Then, while serving as a lieutenant with the Rifle Brigade, he volunteered for an attack on heavily defended Russian positions at Sebastopol.

According to the citation: "He remained in the field until he was twice wounded, all the time acting with great gallantry."

It was during that attack, on a fortress defending the city of Sebastopol, that Major Knox was struck on the left arm by the cannonball.

After his retirement from the Army in 1872, he took up residence at Cheltenham where he died on 8 January 1897 and was buried in the town's cemetery.

Before the auction, medal expert Oliver Pepys, of Spink auctioneers, said: "Major Knox showed incredible bravery, losing his arm to cannon fire in the process.

"The medal is being sold with a Russian cannonball, the very one that smashed into Knox's arm. In all my years of working with rare medals and war artefacts I have never seen a more unusual keepsake."

Victoria Cross medals are still cast from bronze taken from cannons captured from the Russians at Sebastopol.

The VC was being sold along with three other medals he was awarded - the Crimea Medal, the French Legion of Honour and the Turkish Crimea Medal.


OK Corral documents discovered in court storeroom

Records from an inquest into the notorious 1881 shootout at the OK Corral in Tombstone, Arizona, have been discovered in a court storeroom.

The scrawled notes are a transcript of a witness statement about the shootout between lawmen including Wyatt Earp and three outlaws, who were killed.


The documents were last seen about 1960 when they were photocopied.

Researchers hope that restoration by archivists will reveal margin notes not visible on the reproductions.

But the notes are unlikely to shed much new light on the incident, as researchers already had access to the copies.

The pages will soon be digitised and made available online to researchers and Wild West history buffs.

Thirty-second firefight

The yellowed pages, said to be as brittle as potato crisps, were discovered in a manila envelope by court staff assigned to clean out a storage room at Cochise County superior court in Bisbee, Arizona, about 23 miles (37km) south of Tombstone, the Arizona Daily Star newspaper reported.

On 26 October, 1881, Wyatt, Virgil and Morgan Earp and Doc Holliday confronted Ike and Billy Clanton and Frank and Tom McLaury behind the OK Corral.

The McLaurys and Billy Clanton were killed in the ensuing 30-second firefight. The incident and subsequent investigation were covered heavily in the news media at the time.

The fight entered the folklore of the Wild West and made heroes of the Earps. It has been portrayed numerous times in film and in literature.

Nearly 130 years after the shootout, it remains unclear which party fired first and whether all of the outlaws were armed.

The Earps and Holliday said they were defending themselves, but supporters of the dead men said they were murdered.

The document appears to include testimony by William Claiborn, who a historian identified as a friend of the three dead men, according to the Associated Press news agency.

It was recorded as part of an inquiry by a local official into the shootout.

The document indicates that Doc Holliday was carrying a weapon concealed under a long coat.

The town of Tombstone celebrates its part in Wild West history, attracting tourists with re-enactments of the gun battle.

Earlier this month Arizona Governor Jan Brewer, a Republican, signed into law a measure allowing Arizonans to carry concealed firearms without a permit.




Barry Eva (Storyheart)

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Did the earth move for you or was it an act of God?

An Iranian cleric has given a whole new meaning to the age old question "Did the earth move for you?"

Hojjat ol-eslam Kazem Sediqi, the acting Friday prayer leader in Tehran, has blamed the increase in earthquakes on "women who wear revealing clothing and behave promiscuously" (I wonder why there are not more earthquakes in Essex?)

he stated... "Many women who do not dress modestly lead young men astray and spread adultery in society which increases earthquakes."

With tens of thousands of people have died in Iran earthquakes in the last decade, the cleric added.

"What can we do to avoid being buried under the rubble? There is no other solution but to take refuge in religion and to adapt our lives to Islam's moral codes."

More than 25,000 people died when a powerful earthquake hit the ancient city of Bam in 2003.

Seismologists have warned that the capital, Tehran, is situated on a large number of tectonic fault lines and could be hit by a devastating earthquake soon.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said many of Tehran's 12 million inhabitants should relocate.

There are plans to build a purpose built new capital near Qom.


Barry Eva (Storyheart)

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Aye Aye... It's Captain Bligh

A four-man crew is preparing to set sail from Tonga in a 25ft open timber boat, recreating the epic voyage taken by Captain William Bligh after he was cast adrift by mutineers on the HMS Bounty in 1798.

The four man crew plans to cast off for the 4,400-nautical mile journey on April 28, exactly 221 years after Capt Bligh and 18 loyal sailors were abandoned off the Tongan island of Tofua.

Sailing in a 25ft (7.6m) open-deck boat with two small sails, they are hoping to sail from Tonga to West Timor in seven weeks.

The expedition has tried hard to recreate the conditions which confronted the Royal Navy captain.

Memorialised in two Hollywood films as well as novels and poems, the mutiny on the Bounty unfolded in 1789 when William Bligh was cast adrift in the South Pacific by his rebellious crew.

Accompanied by 18 men, Bligh managed to sail from near Tonga to West Timor in a voyage that lasted almost 50 days.

He survived by catching fish and drinking rain water.

Capsize fears

Australians Don McIntyre and David Bryce, Hong Kong businessman David Wilkinson and 18-year-old British gap year student Christopher Wilde are trying to recreate the epic voyage in their own open-top sailing boat.

From Tonga they will head west to Fiji, Vanuatu and Restoration Island before sailing north to Australia's Great Barrier Reef, then through the Torres Strait to West Timor.

To add to the authenticity of the voyage the adventurers are trying to get close to the provisions which Captain Bligh had on board - ship biscuits, pork, over 100 litres of water and six bottles of wine.

Like Bligh, they will not be using any modern-day navigational systems such as charts, compass or lights.

The main difference is that their boat is only about half the size of Bligh's vessel and their biggest fear is the danger of capsizing.

Barry Eva (Storyheart)

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George Washington's $300,000 library book fine

Librarians in New York's oldest library have uncovered a surprising book thief:

George Washington.

The first president of the United States of America borrowed two books from the New York Society Library in 1789 but failed to return them. Adjusting for inflation, this means he has since racked up $300,000 in fines for being some 220 years late.

The New York Society Library says it will not pursue the fine. It would simply like the books back. Famous for his "never told a lie" image, George Washington was not without his faults.

It seems on 5 October 1789, the first president borrowed two books from what was then the only library in Manhattan - "Law of Nations," a dissertation on international relations, and a volume of debate transcripts from Britain's House of Commons.

George Washington did not even bother to sign his name in the borrower's ledger. An aide simply scrawled "president" next to the title to show who had taken them out.

The two tomes were due back a month later but were never returned and have been accruing late fees ever since. Librarians uncovered the misdemeanour as they were digitising the library's ledger from that time.

The New York Society Library says it will not pursue the fine but it would like the books back.

Sadly for fans of 18th-Century political literature, they appear to have vanished. On the balance sheet of George Washington's achievements for America, mark down two small losses, our correspondent says.



Barry Eva (Storyheart)

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Penguin Pulp Pasta Cook Book

An Australian publisher has had to pulp and reprint a cook-book after one recipe listed "salt and freshly ground black people" instead of black pepper.

Penguin Group Australia had to reprint 7,000 copies of Pasta Bible last week, the Sydney Morning Herald has reported.

The reprint cost A$20,000 ($18,000; £12,000), but stock in bookshops will not be recalled as it is "extremely hard" to do so, Penguin said.

The recipe was for spelt tagliatelle with sardines and prosciutto.

"We're mortified that this has become an issue of any kind, and why anyone would be offended, we don't know," head of publishing Bob Sessions is quoted as saying by the Sydney newspaper.

Penguin said almost every one of the more than 150 recipes in the book listed salt and freshly ground black pepper, but a misprint occurred on just one page.

"When it comes to the proofreader, of course they should have picked it up, but proofreading a cook-book is an extremely difficult task. I find that quite forgivable," Mr Sessions said.

If anyone complains about the "silly mistake", they will be given the new version, Penguin said.



Barry Eva (Storyheart)

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Some Bright Spark Job Prospect.

An Australian man built up so much static electricity in his clothes as he walked that he burned carpets, melted plastic and sparked a mass evacuation.
Frank Clewer, of the western Victorian city of Warrnambool, was wearing a synthetic nylon jacket and a woollen shirt when he went for a job interview.

As he walked into the building, the carpet ignited from the 40,000 volts of static electricity that had built up.

"It sounded almost like a firecracker or something like that," he said.
"Within about five minutes, the carpet started to erupt," he told Australian radio.

Considerable current

Perplexed firemen evacuated the building and cut its electricity supply, thinking the burns could have been caused by a power surge.

"There were several scorch marks in the carpet, and we could hear a cracking noise - a bit like a whip - both inside and outside the building," said fire official Henry Barton.

Mr Clewer said that after leaving the building, he scorched a piece of plastic in his car.

His clothes were measured by firemen as carrying an electrical charge of 40,000 volts, the Reuters news agency quoted Mr Barton as saying.

The fire official added that the charge was close to being high enough to cause the items to spontaneously combust.

"I've been firefighting for over 35 years and I've never come across anything like this," he said.



Barry Eva (Storyheart)

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A Change in the Letter of the Law

In 1938, American-born architect Alfred Butts invented the game Scrabble, selling the rights and trademark in 1948 the game has more than stood the test of time.

Now for the first time in the history of Scrabble the rules are going to be changed to allow the use of proper nouns, games company Mattel has said.

Place names, people's names and company names or brands will now count.

Mattel, which brings out a new version of the game containing amended rules in July, hopes the change will encourage younger people to play.

Until now a few proper nouns had been allowed which were determined by a word list based on the Collins dictionary.

In Scrabble, players try to gain the highest points by making words with individual letter tiles on a grid board.

Each letter tile has a points value between one and 10, based on the letter's frequency in standard English.

Various coloured squares on the board can double or triple a player's points.

Mattel said there would be no hard and fast rule over whether a proper noun was correct or not.

A spokeswoman for the company said the use of proper nouns would "add a new dimension" to Scrabble and "introduce an element of popular culture into the game".

She said: "This is one of a number of twists and challenges included that we believe existing fans will enjoy and will also enable younger fans and families to get involved."

However, Mattel said it would not be doing away with the old rules altogether.

It will continue to sell a board with the original rules.

I can just see all those Scrabble-hollicks working their way through maps of Europe tring to find those wonderful Polish or Slavakian names which use 4 "J's", 3 "Z's" and a couple of "X's"


Barry Eva (Storyheart)

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US girl sues for $1m over arrest for desk scribble

I often say that as the west was being developed, the lasso was one of the cowboys major tools. It seems over the years in modern USA the "lass" part has been dropped and today's American just main tool seems to be "Sui".

Yesterday the stupidity that goes with some of these legal cases again showed it's ugly face, when it was announced that 12-year-old US schoolgirl is suing the New York City authorities for $1m in damages after she was arrested for writing on her desk.

Alexa Gonzalez was led out of her school in handcuffs by police after she was caught scribbling a message to her friends with an erasable, green marker.




Miss Gonzalez and her mother are suing the police and education departments in New York City.

They are claiming for excessive use of force and violation of her rights.

Miss Gonzalez was caught scribbling "I love my friends Abby and Faith" on her desk during a Spanish class in February.

The 12-year-old said her Spanish teacher then "dragged" her to the dean's office where police were called.

'Better judgement'

Miss Gonzalez told the New York Daily News she broke down as she was led out of Junior High School 190 in Queens in handcuffs.

"I started crying, like, a lot," she said. "I made two little doodles... It could be easily erased. To put handcuffs on me is unnecessary."

She said she was then held at a local school precinct for hours in what she calls a traumatizing and excessive ordeal.

New York City officials have acknowledged the arrest was a mistake, saying better judgement should have been used by the arresting officers.

Miss Gonzalez was suspended from school and tried in a family court, where she was given eight hours of community service and ordered to write an essay about lessons to be learned from the incident.

Her family's lawyer said the school had overreacted by calling the police.

Barry Eva (Storyheart)

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First chocolate, now see what is good for you?

Early in the week I blogged about how with much cheering from many a female it had been reported that chocolate was actually good for you. Today we can add to that.

Women who drink wine 'less likely to gain weight'

Women can enjoy a tipple and stay slim, according to a study that shows moderate drinkers gain less weight than teetotallers.

Women who drank red wine gained the least, but the results held for other wines, beers and spirits.

Although alcohol contains calories, the US researchers believe the women may have substituted it for other food.

Their work in the Archives of Internal Medicine followed over 19,000 women over 13 years.

The women recruited into the study were aged 39 or over and of normal weight at the time they joined.

Over the next 13 years, on average, they gained weight progressively.

Those who drank no alcohol gained the most weight, and there was an inverse relationship between weight gain and alcohol consumption.

Even after accounting for lifestyle, dietary factors and things like smoking and exercise, the study found those who drank the least gained the most weight.

Moderate drinking was classed as drinking up to about two 150ml glasses of wine a day.

Although the study did not include men, the authors believe the findings may not apply to men.

FIVE OTHER REASONS WHY WINE MAY BE GOOD FOR YOU

1: Feed your head
Wine could preserve your memory. When researchers gave memory quizzes to women in their 70s, those who drank one drink or more every day scored much better than those who drank less or not at all.

2: Boost your body’s defenses
n one British study, those who drank roughly a glass of wine a day reduced by 11% their risk of infection by Helicobacter pylori bacteria, a major cause of gastritis, ulcers, and stomach cancers.

3:Guard against ovarian woes
hen Australian researchers recently compared women with ovarian cancer to cancer-free women, they found that roughly one glass of wine a day seemed to reduce the risk of the disease by as much as 50 percent.

4: Build better bones
On average, women who drink moderately seem to have higher bone mass than abstainers. Alcohol appears to boost estrogen levels; the hormone seems to slow the body’s destruction of old bone more than it slows the production of new bone.

5: Prevent blood-sugar trouble
Premenopausal women who drink one or two glasses of wine a day are 40 percent less likely than women who don’t drink to develop type 2 diabetes, according to a 10-year study by Harvard Medical School. While the reasons aren’t clear, wine seems to reduce insulin resistance in diabetic patients.


Barry Eva (Storyheart)

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Stop in the Name of Love.

Pill is pilfered.

Spanish police say they have detained a man suspected of robbing 10 pharmacies at gunpoint, taking their money and all available boxes of Viagra.

Police in Madrid began receiving reports of the thefts in January.

Victims said the "only objective" of the lone gunman was to take boxes of Viagra and cash.

The authorities suspect the 43-year-old man of selling the pills on the black market, where they are sought by users for recreational purposes.

Combined with the illegal drug Ecstasy, the anti-impotence pill is well known on the club scene as Sexstasy.

Viagra manufacturer Pfizer warns the drug should not be taken unless recommended by a doctor.


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