"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."



Barry Eva (Storyheart)

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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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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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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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New York police say sorry with a cheesecake

According to Wikipedia cheesecake is a dessert consisting of a topping made of soft, fresh cheese on a base made from biscuit, pastry or sponge. However for the new York police force it is a way of saying sorry to an elderly couple in Brooklyn.

The New York's police chief delivered the cheesecake to an elderly couple in Brooklyn, to apologies for dozens of mistaken police visits to their home.

A computer glitch had led officers to Walter and Rose Martin's home 50 times in the past eight years, police said.

The latest intrusion came on Tuesday, with officers pounding on the front and back doors, shouting "Police, open up!"

Thursday's visit - cheesecake in hand - went well. The Martins, aged 82 and 83, shared pictures of their grandchildren.

New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly visited the couple's modest home on Friday to "apologies and explain" for the mix-up, NYPD Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne told the Associated Press.

The problem started in 2002, when the Martin's home address was used as "test data" for a new computer crime-tracking system.

The couple complained about the harrowing visits in 2007, but the data remained in the system despite efforts to "purge the records", Deputy Commissioner Browne said.

He added that the Martin's address had now been flagged with alerts "barring officers" from questioning the octogenarians.


Barry Eva (Storyheart)

Stoned Wallabies Creating Crop Circles

Australian wallabies are eating opium poppies and creating crop circles as they hop around "as high as a kite", a government official has said.

The attorney general for the island state of Tasmania, said the kangaroo-like marsupials were getting into poppy fields grown for medicine.

She was reporting to a parliamentary hearing on security for poppy crops.

Australia supplies about 50% of the world's legally-grown opium used to make morphine and other painkillers.

"The one interesting bit that I found recently in one of my briefs on the poppy industry was that we have a problem with wallabies entering poppy fields, getting as high as a kite and going around in circles," the hearing was told. "Then they crash, and we see crop circles in the poppy industry from wallabies that are high."

Rick Rockliff, a spokesman for poppy producer Tasmanian Alkaloids, said the wallaby incursions were not very common, but other animals had also been spotted in the poppy fields acting unusually.

"There have been many stories about sheep that have eaten some of the poppies after harvesting and they all walk around in circles," he added.

Retired Tasmanian poppy farmer Lyndley Chopping also said he had seen strange behaviour from wallabies in his fields.

"They would just come and eat some poppies and they would go away," he told ABC News.

"They'd come back again and they would do their circle work in the paddock."

Some people believe the mysterious circles that appear in fields in a number of countries are created by aliens. Others put them down to a human hoax.

Of course this brought in a huge load of comments, here's a few of the better ones...

I have seen a stoned wallaby but I don't know about them making crop circles. The one I saw was slurring his words and asking me for a dollar as he was trying to get the boat to see his brother in New Zealand - he looked in no mood to be formulating a series of complex agricultural design patterns

Funniest headline of the year so far. Trippy Skippy.

And my favorite...

I saw a whole bunch of them dingos going mad in my corn field only last night. I'm not sure if they were high or not but I'm pretty sure they were. One of them had a ghettoblaster and they were listening to some kind of fast electronic music.



Barry Eva (Storyheart)