The Dangers of Rising Damp...

Don’t look now, but there’s an alligator behind your sofa…

A woman in Brazil was shocked to find an alligator hiding behind her sofa after heavy rains flooded her house in the town of Parauapebas, in Para state.

She said she was alerted to the reptile's presence by her three-year-old son, who was patting its head.

The woman snatched the child away and called the fire brigade, who trapped the 1.5m-long (5ft) alligator.

The firefighters said the family was lucky the reptile was not hungry.

Firefighter Captain Luiz Claudio Farias said it could have seriously hurt or even killed the boy.

Capt Farias said it was not uncommon for animals such as alligators and snakes to enter people's houses in towns such as Parauapebas which are built very near rivers and the rainforest.

He said the reptile had been released in a less populated area of the town.

Barry Eva (Storyheart)

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Colombian declared world's shortest man

A 70cm (27-inch) tall Colombian has been named the world's shortest living man by Guinness World Records.

Edward Nino Hernandez, 24, weighs only 10kg (22lbs). His mother said he had not grown since he was two years old.

Mr Hernandez, who works part-time as a dancer, told the Associated Press: "I feel happy because I'm unique."

The previous record holder was He Pingping of China, who was 4cm (1.5 inches) taller and died in March - before Mr Hernandez was discovered.

Mr Hernandez is not expected to keep the title for long, however, as Khagendra Thapa Magar of Nepal is expected to take the title when he turns 18 in October.

Khagendra, currently recognised as the world's shortest living teenager, is only 56cm (22in) tall. The shortest man on record was Gul Mohammed of India, who measured just 57cm - 1cm taller than Khagendra.

Mr Hernandez's mother, Noemi, said doctors in the Colombian capital, Bogota, never explained why he had grown only 40cm since birth.

She said doctors at the National University studied him until he was three and then lost interest. Her youngest child, 11-year-old Miguel Angel, is himself only 93cm (37in) tall

Mr Hernandez left school in the eighth grade and now earns some money dancing at department stores. He is also currently playing the role of a drug dealer in a film.

Although he liked the attention, he said there were some drawbacks.

"It bothers me that people are always touching me and picking me up."





Don't Forget November is MALE YA MONTH



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"Smarter than your average bear"

Not exactly Yogi, but is seems there was one smart bear who wanted to go joy riding.

A bear climbed into an empty car in the US state of Colorado, sounded the horn and sent the vehicle rolling down hill with the terrified animal still inside.

The car's owner, 17-year-old Ben Story, took a snap of the panic-stricken bear as it demolished the inside of his vehicle in its bid to escape.

Police in Larkspur, near Denver, eventually freed the animal by opening the door from a distance using a rope.

It is believed the bear was attracted by a sandwich left on the back seat.

Mr Story and his family were asleep when the bear opened the unlocked door of his 2008 Toyota Corolla in the early hours of the morning and climbed inside.

'Flashers on'

Mr Story's father, Ralph, said the bear must have hit the car's automatic transmission into neutral sending it rolling backwards 125ft (38m), off the driveway, down an embankment and into a thicket of trees.

"The four-way flashers were on. It's like he knew what was going on, and kept hitting the horn," he told Denver's 7News.

Once the car door closed behind the bear, it was trapped inside.

Ben Story said his car was wrecked.

"It [the bear] was a pretty good size, actually it was pretty big. If you look at the inside of the car, there's nothing left at all. You could see it moving around, it like took up the entire inside of the car."

The bear was last seen running into the woods.

Colorado wildlife expert Tyler Baskfield said bears often entered cars and houses in search of food.

"It happens all the time," he said. "They're very smart."



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Move a dead badger? More a case of "weasel overcome"

We have been a little light on the funny side of life over the last few weeks, but today is a good one...

Workmen painting white lines on a main road left a gap for a dead badger because it was not their responsibility to clear up the carcass, a council has said.
The animal was killed on the A338 near Downton on the Hampshire-Wiltshire border but when Hampshire County Council workmen came to paint white lines in the centre of the road, they decided to leave a space until the body had been removed.

The responsibility for picking up the remains was the responsibility of New Forest District Council.

Businessman Kevin Maul, of Winterbourne Dauntsey, Salisbury, Wiltshire, who spotted the gap in the lines, said: "I couldn't quite believe my eyes when I saw this poor old badger who had been there over a week.

"Then I drove home to see his body between the lines - they had painted the road, but left a gap where he lay."

Mel Kendal, Hampshire County Council executive member for the environment, said: "We would usually liaise with our colleagues at the district council, who dispose of animal carcasses on the highways, to ensure the badger was removed before the white line-painting crew did this stretch of road.

"This appears not to have happened in this case and the white line-painting crew did what they thought was best until arrangements could be made to dispose of the carcass.

"These arrangements have now been made and the gap in the white lines will be filled in, at no extra cost to the council tax-payer


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Cat, Bear or Seagull?

Mr Pooh: lives in Shoreham by Sea, on the Sussex coast (in England), which is just a stones throw from where I used to live in Engalnd, okay a very long stobnes throw, but close enough.

He's a seagull. Or maybe he's a cat. Or maybe, given his nickname, he's actually a bear.

Whatever he 'thinks' he is, Pooh the seagull is a family pet.

He has been part of the Grimwood family from Shoreham-by-Sea ever since he arrived unexpectedly as a baby.

Pooh didn't even arrive conventionally by exiting an egg.

In fact the Grimwoods found him in their fireplace one day.

"We heard a rustle in the lounge when we were watching telly and we suddenly thought 'Ooh - what's that?" said June Grimwood.

"We reached into the chimney and pulled out this young chick."
He was just a baby gull at the time, albeit an ash-covered baby after falling down the chimney.

"We put him back on the roof, but it was a bit of a windy day and he fell back off."

Instead of getting into a flap, June and Steve Grimwood calmly nursed him and fed him cat food.

He ate it alongside some unlikely companions - the family cats.

"He slept in the cats' basket, mingled in amongst the cats and was happy as Larry,"

Then, one day, Pooh flew the nest.

But he still returns for six months every year. In fact, in a sense, he's still at home with Mum and Dad, because he and his partner nest on their roof.

Pooh comes in for meals three times a day, with the cats Mitzi, Gus and Henry.

"He feeds out of the cat bowls, he comes indoors and takes the cats' biscuits out of their feeder. I think he does believe that he is actually a cat," said Mrs Grimwood.

"I wouldn't say he's mixed up. He's just very clever. He knows where to go for a good B&B (Bed and Breakfast)is by the seaside every year."

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Balloon Goes Up in South Korea

Balloons released by schoolchildren sparked a major security alert in South Korea, reports say, amid heightened tensions with North Korea.

A resident of Ansan, near Seoul, reported seeing 40-50 objects resembling parachutes falling on a mountainside.

The military and police mobilised a special joint task force.

Upon investigation, the objects turned out to be helium balloons released by a local school.

Tensions between North and South Korea have been running high since the sinking of a South Korean warship earlier this year. Seoul said the ship was torpedoed by Northern forces.

In another incident earlier this month, an alert was raised after an explosion was heard on Yeonpyeong island, near the sea border with North Korea, and a diving suit was found on a shoreline, the JoongAng newspaper reported.

A joint military and police investigation found that the diving suit was abandoned by a fisherman and that the explosion had been caused by a South Korean mine, the paper said


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Green Green Grass of Home

An English soccer fan has taken the starting of the World Cup perhaps just a little too far. Dan Taylor has transformed his living room into a mini football pitch for the World Cup.

England fan Dan, who's a legal secretary, thinks he used about 100 sq ft of turf but says it only took a couple of hours to lay. "I put some flags up and I put some bunting up but I looked around the room and I just thought something was lacking."

He admits he's not much of a gardener: "The reason I did it was obviously for the World Cup. It was simply a case of just going down the gardening centre and picking up the turf."


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Shoe Shops of the Ancient World

The oldest example of a leather shoe has been discovered by archaeologists in a cave in Armenia.

At 5,500 years old, the well preserved cow-hide shoe pre-dates Stonehenge by 400 years and the Pyramids of Giza by 1,000 years.

It was made of a single piece of leather and was shaped to fit the wearer's foot, the researchers say.

They have published details of the discovery from south-east Armenia in the journal Plos One.

The shoe contained grass, although the archaeologists are uncertain as to whether this was to keep the foot warm or to maintain the shape of the footwear.

The authors are unsure whether it was worn by a man or a woman. The shoe is relatively small, corresponding to a UK women's size 5 (European size 38; US size 7 women), but it could have been worn by a man of that period.

It was discovered at the Areni-1 cave in the Vayotz Dzor province of Armenia, which borders on Turkey and Iran.

The archaeologists put the shoe's remarkable preservation down to the stable, cool and dry conditions in the cave and the fact that the floor of the cave was covered by a thick layer of sheep dung.

This layer of excrement acted as a solid seal, preserving it over the millennia.

"We thought initially that the shoe and other objects were about 600-700 years old because they were in such good condition," said co-author Dr Ron Pinhasi from University College Cork in Ireland.

"It was only when the material was dated by the two radiocarbon laboratories in Oxford and in California that we realised that the shoe was older by a few hundred years than the shoes worn by Oetzi the Iceman."

Other well preserved objects were also found in the cave, including large containers, many of which held wheat and barley, apricots and other edible plants.

Sandals made from plant fibres found at the Arnold Research Cave in Missouri, US, pre-date the shoes from Areni by some 2,000-2,500 years.




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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."



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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.


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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.



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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.



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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"


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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.

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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.


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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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Follow That Toad

If you see the toads leaving, run for the hills.

The Common toads appear to be able to sense an impending earthquake and will flee their colony days before the seismic activity strikes.The evidence comes from a population of toads which left their breeding colony three days before an earthquake that struck L'Aquila in Italy in 2009.

How toads sensed the quake is unclear, but most breeding pairs and males fled.

They reacted despite the colony being 74km from the quake's epicenter, say biologists in the Journal of Zoology.

It is hard to objectively and quantifiably study how animals respond to seismic activity, in part because earthquakes are rare and unpredictable.

Some studies have been done on how domestic animals respond, but measuring the response of wild animals is more difficult.

Even those that have been shown to react, such as fish, rodents and snakes tend to do so shortly before an earthquakes strikes, rather than days ahead of the event.

However, biologist Dr Rachel Grant of the Open University, in Milton Keynes, UK, was routinely studying the behavior of various colonies of common toads on a daily basis in Italy around the time a massive earthquake struck.

Her studies included a 29-day period gathering data before, during and after the earthquake that hit Italy on 6 April 2009.

The quake, a 6.3-magnitude event, struck close to L'Aquila city, about 95km (60 miles) north-east of Rome.

Dr Grant was studying toads 74km away in San Ruffino Lake in central Italy, when she recorded the toads behaving oddly.

Five days before the earthquake, the number of male common toads in the breeding colony fell by 96%.

AMPHIBIAN PHENOMENA
Common frogs (Rana temporaria) mating
Dr Grant has also shown that many amphibians around the world synchronize their mating activity by the full Moon, a phenomenon not reported before
The world's first truly monogamous amphibian was described earlier this year
Listen to a common toad croaking

That is highly unusual for male toads: once they have bred, they normally remain active in large numbers at breeding sites until spawning has finished.

Yet spawning had barely begun at the San Ruffino Lake site before the earthquake struck.

Also, no weather event could be linked to the toads' disappearance.

Three days before the earthquake, the number of breeding pairs also suddenly dropped to zero.

While spawn was found at the site up to six days before the earthquake, and again six days after it, no spawn was laid during the so-called earthquake period - the time from the first main shock to the last aftershock.

"Our study is one of the first to document animal behavior before, during and after an earthquake," says Dr Grant.

She believes the toads fled to higher ground, possibly where they would be at less risk from rock falls, landslides and flooding.

Exactly how the toads sense impending seismic activity is unclear.

The shift in the toads' behaviour coincided with disruptions in the ionosphere, the uppermost electromagnetic layer of the earth's atmosphere, which researchers detected around the time of the L'Aquila quake using a technique known as very low frequency (VLF) radio sounding.

ITALIAN EARTHQUAKE

Use this map to explore coverage of the Italian earthquake in video, audio, pictures and text
After the quake, L'Aquila was described as a 'broken city'
Read 'A history of deadly earthquakes'

Such changes to the atmosphere have in turn been linked by some scientists to the release of radon gas, or gravity waves, prior to an earthquake.

In the case of the L'Aquila quake, Dr Grant could not determine what caused the disruptions in the ionosphere.

However, her findings do suggest that the toads can detect something.

"Our findings suggest that toads are able to detect pre-seismic cues such as the release of gases and charged particles, and use these as a form of earthquake early warning system," she says.

Ants ignore quakes

One other study has quantified an animal's response to a major earthquake.

Researchers had the serendipitous opportunity to measure how the behavior of the desert harvester ant (Messor pergandei) changed as the ground began to tremble in the Mojave Desert, California, on 28 June 1992.

The largest quake to hit the US in four decades struck during the middle of an ongoing study, which measured how many ants walked the trails to and from the colony, the distributions of worker ants and even how much carbon dioxide the ants produced.

However, in response to that 7.4 magnitude quake, the ants did not appear to alter their behavior at all.


Barry Eva (Storyheart)

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