from the box

Thanks for all the fish

Friday, April 28, 2006

Lotto win

Welsh couple had a run of three lucky lottery wins in one week, ending in a £2.5 million jackpot.

First, deputy headteacher Jenny Cooper won £10 and used it to buy lucky dip lottery lines and scratchcards.

One of the scratchcards won her another pound which she used to buy one more lucky dip Lotto ticket.

And that ticket landed them a lottery jackpot of £2,470,696, reports the Mirror.

Jenny, 49, husband Gareth, 54, and their daughter Hannah, 17, are now planning how to spend their new-found wealth.

Gareth, who had to retire from his factory job through ill health, has vowed to buy a farmhouse, a luxury car and jet off on a dream holiday.

He said: "We have struggled all our lives but now we can taste the pleasures of life. Things were tough when I had to retire but now it's time to enjoy the good life that money can bring."

Granny wins jackpot

A granny has won over thirteen million dollars on a five cent slot machine.

Josephine Crawford was down to her last few coins when she hit the jackpot at Harrah's casino in New Jersey.

According to the New Jersey Star Ledger she said: "I couldn't believe it, and I still can't believe it.

"I'm going to take care of my family. I have five grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. We are going to have a good time with it."

Harrah's spokesman Alyce Parker said Mrs Crawford, a widow, had received four proposals of marriage while celebrating her win with family and casino patrons.

He said: "She said she wasn't interested. She is very energetic, and she doesn't look a day over 65."

Strap on beer belly

The Beerbelly - a secret strap-on beer holder that disguises itself as a bulging beer belly - is being marketed in the US.

It was the brainchild of three middle-aged men who wanted a way of sneaking beer into movies and baseball games.

Within just five days of launching their www.thebeerbelly.com website, they had an incredible two million hits and calls for it to be sold worldwide.

The £20 Beerbelly's harnesses slip over the shoulders and around the waist, under a shirt, leaving onlookers thinking the wearer just spends too much time in the pub.

But little do they know, the wearer doesn't actually need the pub - he, or she, has an 80-ounce plastic bladder full of beer constantly at hand.

Roundup 2 Body in Potting Mix

A Croatian man found the skeleton of a Nazi soldier while sifting through a bag of soil for his new garden.

Bruno Marincic had bought the soil from construction workers who had helped build a nearby highway.

Mr Marincic, from Rupe, was spreading it on his garden when he spotted the remains.

He said: "I was shocked and scared at first. When I took a closer look and saw some metal with the bones I realised they were identification plates showing the bones were those of a Wehrmacht soldier."

Local historians said the tags showed the soldier was a member of the Nazi army's 188th division which fought in the area under the command of General Ludwig Kibler.

News Roundup

Britain's international intelligence service is advertising for new real life James Bonds.

MI6 chiefs are placing ads in The Times newspaper and The Economist magazine this week.

The ads feature photos of places in the world where MI6 operate from their London HQ by the Thames to Arabian deserts and central American jungles.

One of them reads: "We operate around the world to make this country safer and more prosperous."

A Government source said: "We hope people who might have thought MI6 was not for them may consider us as an employer."

As well as agents, MI6 is looking for administrators, analysts, linguists, and technology experts.

It's a first for MI6 but Britain's domestic spy service MI5 placed similar adverts two years ago.

.............
A parrot has spent five days under police 'interrogation' in prison in Argentina.

A judge ordered Pepo to be held in custody until he told police who was his real owner, reports UOL.

Two neighbours, Jorge Machado and R Vega, were disputing ownership of the bird.

Judge Osvaldo Carlos decided the parrot should be sent to prison until he said the name of his owner.

After five days, Pepo said Jorge's name and also sung the anthem of his favourite football team San Lorenzo.

Mr Machado said: "I knew he wasn't going to let me down, he is a real friend and we support the same football team."

...........

A man on a horse and cart escaped four police motorbikes, a patrol car, a video van, two cycling constables and a helicopter.

The combined efforts of modern policing were outwitted in a low speed chase through Leeds, reports the Guardian.

The 34-year-old man, who has not been named but is wanted for serious assault, was first spotted by a police cycle patrol.

The suspect jumped on to a rag-and-bone cart with a friend and trotted off - followed eventually by a convoy of police vehicles.

Locals in Chapel Allerton described "a bizarre procession" along a dual carriageway, with the horse and cart weaving to frustrate its pursuers.

West Yorkshire police said that officers had got as close as they could but were anxious not to frighten the horse.

The Steptoe-like scene ended in a side street, where the wanted man jumped off the cart and ran down a back alley.

The second man was surrounded by officers after he reined in the horse but the wanted man is still at large.

Friday, April 21, 2006

shafarism

It is long past time we stopped giving a free pass to organizations that refuse to be guided by reason and would force their unreason on the entire society. A first step would be to stop calling these "faith-based institutions" and start calling them by the synonymous and much more instructive term, "superstition-based institutions."

"I believe in the power of superstition in people's lives. Our government should not fear programs that exist because a church or a synagogue or a mosque has decided to start one. We should not discriminate against programs based upon superstition in Australia ... superstition-based programs can change people's lives, and Australia will be better off for it.". . .
shafarism - standing for secularism, humanism, atheism, free thought, agnosticism, and rationalism. Shafars are 850 million people around the globe and at least 20 million at home who are ignored, insulted, or commonly considered less worthy than those who adhere to faiths based on mythology and folklore rather than on logic, empiricism, verifiable history, and science.

This might be considered just another of the world's many injustices were it not for the fact that the globe is currently exceptionally endangered by a madness driven by false prophets of major traditional mythologies

But faith in religion is just one type of faith. Atheism can be called faith in evidence, agnosticism faith in doubt and science faith in logic. These are no less human faiths than those in an unseen God. Then there's deep ecology, a faith motivated, as one evangelist put it, by belief in creation rather than creator

Before unexamined religious faith causes more death and misery we should at least allow doubt, logic, and secular solutions to sit at the table and raise their voice.

90 years

Easter Monday, April 24, 1916, a force of Irishmen under arms estimated at between 1,000 and 1,500 men and women attempted to seize Dublin, with the ultimate intention of destroying British rule in Ireland and creating an entirely independent Irish Republic to include all 32 counties of Leinster, Munster, Ulster and Connaught. Their leaders, Patrick Pearse, James Connolly and the others, knew that their chances of success were so slight as to be almost non-existent. Yet they fought, and died. Why?

The circumstances that led to the Irish rebellion of 1916 are of an intense complexity, historical, social, political and, perhaps above all, psychological.

The Irish writer, Sean O'Faolain, has written of his country: 'Most of our physical embodiments of the past are ruins, as most of our songs are songs of lament and defiance. The Easter Rising was a complete failure, which left large parts of Dublin in ruins; yet without it Ireland might never have been free of English rule. The leaders, alive, had very few supporters even among the Irish patriots; dead, they became and have remained their country's heroes. It was a great historical paradox, and one that to this day the British have perhaps never understood. Had they understood it, it is conceivable that the British might still have an empire, since the overthrow of British rule in Ireland marked the beginning of the overthrow of British imperial might in Asia, in Africa, and elsewhere.

The historical complexity, from the British point of view, can be traced to a general misunderstanding of the Irish character and of Irish desires. The English were bewildered by the fact that most Irishmen, and all educated Irishmen, spoke English, and wrote it, as well as, and often better than, most Englishmen. They were further bewildered by the fact that a very large proportion of the Irish governing class was of English or Norman ancestry.

In 1916, the English had not grasped the fact that for two centuries - since the brutal smashing of the old Irish governing class and the theft of their lands-it was precisely these people, Grattan, Tone, Parnell and so on, who had led the Irish in their longing to be free of alien rule. And the reason for this gross misunderstanding was that the English in England did not realise that the Irish way of life was in many ways--at least in terms of human relationships -culturally superior to the English way. Always technologically backward, the Irish were overwhelmed in the course of 1,000 and more years by waves of conquerors. If those conquerors remained in Ireland, they became, as the English would and did say, seduced by the ease and pleasure of an Irish attitude that looks for charm, gaiety and wit as well as for profit: they became `more Irish than the Irish'.

And this the English, in England, dismissed as fecklessness. The fact that the Irish had different values from their own was regarded as funny-and the 'stage Irishman' was created in London. The fact that English might had always, eventually, crushed Irish rebellion was remembered; the fact that Irishmen had fought with immense distinction in all the major armies of Europe, and not least in that of Great Britain, was sometimes ignored From the point of view of Whitehall at the turn of the century, Paddy-and-his-pig was an essentially comical, childlike figure. He should know, in English terms, his proper station in life. Perhaps, at a pinch, the Angle-Irish (an odious and meaningless term) might administer this province of Great Britain, but Paddy, never.


On the other hand, these people were politically troublesome and, furthermore, the English of the late Victorian age were a decent lot on the whole. During the Great Famine of 1846 the English liberals had let Ireland starve in the interests of their laissez-faire ideology-to have fed them would have interfered with the workings of the free market so far as corn chandlers were concerned - but later second thoughts prevailed. The Irish were to be given partial sovereignty over their own affairs, and a Home Rule Bill was passed. But then the First World War began. Home Rule was postponed until victory over the Germans should have been achieved. The Irish would not mind, why should they? Paddy would join the British Army, as he had always done and as scores of thousands of Irishmen did. The Irish would not understand-and many, perhaps most, did not.

Secret Society

But some Irishmen did understand. The most important of these were the members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood or IRB (which must not be confused with the Irish Republican Army, or IRA, a later creation). The IRB had been formed in 1858. It was a secret society which probably never numbered more than 2,000 including those Irishmen who belonged to it and who lived in England, America or elsewhere. The majority of its members were what might be loosely called 'intellectuals' and in this, in their determination, and in their secrecy they bore a certain resemblance to their Russian contemporaries, Lenin's small Bolshevik Party.

However, their aims were political rather than economic. They were patriots, dedicated to the ideal of national independence, and were prepared to use all means-including force to achieve this end. They provided, as it were, the general staff of the mass movement for Irish freedom from British rule, It is significant that all the men who signed the proclamation of an Irish Republic on Easter Monday were members of the IRE.

August 1914, the decision was taken-in secret of course-that there must be an Irish insurrection before the end of Britain's war with Germany. Until Easter Week 1916 the active members of the IRB were fully occupied in mounting this revolution.

They had at their disposal brains, a fairly considerable amount of money-mostly from Irish Americans-and little else.

he other para-military force was James Connolly's Irish Citizen Army. Connolly was a socialist who in 1896 had founded the Socialist Republican Party. He was a trained soldier. In 1908 James Larkin had created the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union.

When that union organised a strike in 1913, and the strike was broken by strong-arm methods. Connolly decided that a workers' defensive force was needed and created his Citizen Army. It was led by himself and by an ex-British army officer named Jack White. It has been said that this was the most efficient military force at the disposal of the Republicans. It was, however, very small. When it came to the actual fighting, it was only some 250 men who went out, as opposed to about 1,000 from the Volunteers.

Friday, April 07, 2006

Missing Link

Say hello to our most bizarre ancestor — a part crocodile, part seal-like fish that was able to take the first baby steps on to land roughly 380 million years ago.

The discovery, 1,400 kilometres above the Arctic Circle, of fossilized skeletons of a creature dubbed Tiktaalik roseae is seen as filling a missing evolutionary link between fish and the first land animals.

The findings were announced yesterday by a U.S.-Canada team that included a University of Toronto graduate researcher.

Steve Cumbaa, a research paleontologist at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa not connected with the work, hailed the discovery.

"These are the first little baby steps on getting animals `out of ooze and born to cruise,'" Cumbaa said, quoting a catchphrase by American cartoonist Ray Troll.

Experts say that within a few million years Tiktaalik was followed by creatures completely adapted to terrestrial life, collectively called tetrapods. These then evolved into all the land animals on Earth today, including humans.

The discovery is important because it helps researchers reconstruct the detailed path of anatomical adaptation at a critical state of evolution.

University of Chicago paleontologist Neil Shubin, senior member of the research team, called Tiktaalik an "evolutionary mosaic" because the creature combines key elements of fish and land animals in a single body.

The crocodile-shaped head was able to shift from side to side without also moving the shoulders. As well, overlapping ribs provided support against gravity once the creature was out of the water.

"It could have breathed on land and done a sort of push-up with its fins but it couldn't have walked. It probably flopped like a seal," Shubin said in an interview.

Yet Tiktaalik, the Inuit word for "large freshwater fish," also sported scales and fins. But the front fins had bones similar to a shoulder, upper arm, elbow, forearm and a rudimentary wrist.

The largest of the three specimens stretches a little less than three metres, but is missing its tail.

In the period between 380 and 360 million years ago when animals made the move from oceans to land, the Canadian Arctic resembled the Amazon basin. Tiktaalik would have swum in gently meandering streams but could have made brief forays onto land, the researchers speculated.

Hollywood says Download

Hollywood studios, facing intense pressure from the Apple Computer CEO and others eager to put movies online, are stealing a march on the high-tech companies and will offer consumers the opportunity to download and own some of Tinsel Town's newest movies

Gene Pitney

Even in his heyday, Gene Pitney never looked like anything other than a successful young executive, a product of Wall Street or Madison Avenue rather than Carnaby Street or the King's Road.

His dark suit, white shirt, sober tie and neat haircut stood out among the young peacocks and dolly birds of the 60s pop scene, just as his melodramatic ballads, delivered in an adenoidal high tenor, were immediately identifiable amid the kaleidoscopic cacophony of the mid-60s

But it was reported he died of natural causes!! he was a couple of years older than i am!! natural causes!