-- While skiing through Prospect Park in Brooklyn, New York, Todd Bieber found a roll of undeveloped film that was shot during the New York City blizzard. He is now on a quest to figure out who shot these photos and how he can return the film to them. So if you feel you can help Todd out, shoot him an email!

“Darco Sangermano, 28, was hit in the temple by the .22 calibre bullet while wandering with his girlfriend through Naples – a city in Italy notorious for its rowdy New Year celebrations, often involving firearms and powerful fireworks.

The bullet went through the right side of his head, behind his eye socket and lodged in his nasal passage but miraculously did no serious damage.

Bleeding heavily, he was taken to hospital in an ambulance shortly after midnight, but while waiting to be seen by doctors he sneezed and the bullet shot out of his right nostril.

Mr Sangermano, a craftsman from Turin, returned to his hometown after being released from hospital.

"The route of the bullet broke his temporal bone, near his temple, and this slowed down the bullet which grazed his eyeball without hitting it directly," Dr Guglielmo Ramieri told Gente magazine…”

READ HERE

“In 1964, Lyndon Johnson needed pants, so he called the Haggar clothing company and asked for some. The call was recorded (like all White House calls at the time), and has since become the stuff of legend. Johnson’s anatomically specific directions to Mr. Haggar are some of the most intimate words we’ve ever heard from the mouth of a President.

We at Put This On took the historic original audio and gave it to animator Tawd Dorenfeld, who created this majestic fantasia of bungholiana.

Enjoy this special treat from Put This On: LBJ Orders Pants. Then share it with a friend who loves pants…”

Put This On: LBJ Buys Pants from Put This On on Vimeo.

-- Yes, this is completely true and you can find the original recording right here, - whitehousetapes.org

Apparently the funeral he's talking of is actually a private memorial for Gen. Douglas MacArthur which was held with his family at the 7th Regiment Armory, before he was moved to the Capitol building to lie in State. Gifted orator for sure! Hahaha...

-- It's a matter of common courtesy. And, yes, it is purchasable.

SEE HERE

“One hundred years is a very long time. Yet in the hierarchy of modern marvels, the ability to recover and launch aircraft from the deck of a moving ship stands out as one of our most signature accomplishments. Which just goes to show you: Some tricks never grow old.

Naval aviation was invented one hundred years ago today, on January 18, 1911, when a 24 year-old barnstormer pilot named Eugene B. Ely completed the world's first successful landing on a ship. It happened in San Francisco Bay, aboard the cruiser USS Pennsylvania, which had a temporary, 133-foot wooden landing strip built above her afterdeck and gun turret as part of the experiment…”

-- Ely's landing was just eight years after the Wright Brothers made their first flight at Kitty Hawk. His aircraft was a super rudimentary Curtiss Model D "Pusher" biplane equipped with a 60 hp V-8 engine that gave the aircraft a 50 mph airspeed. I linked to another blog that has a great summary of the event, but you can find more info just about anywhere, including the US Navy website.

READ HERE

“NO WAR, no peace, is the usual state of affairs between Israel and its neighbours in the Middle East. But every time an attempt at Arab-Israeli peacemaking fails, as Barack Obama’s did shortly before Christmas, the peace becomes a little more fragile and the danger of war increases. Sadly, there is reason to believe that unless remedial action is taken, 2011 might see the most destructive such war for many years.

One much-discussed way in which war might arise stems from the apparent desire of Iran to acquire nuclear weapons at any cost, and Israel’s apparent desire to stop Iran at any cost. But fear of Iran’s nuclear programme is only one of the fuses that could detonate an explosion at any moment. Another is the frantic arms race that has been under way since the inconclusive war in 2006 between Israel and Hizbullah, Iran’s ally in Lebanon. Both sides have been intensively preparing for what each says will be a “decisive” second round.

Such a war would bear little resemblance to the previous clashes between Israel and its neighbours. For all their many horrors, the Lebanon war of 2006 and the Gaza war of 2009 were limited affairs. On the Israeli side, in particular, civilian casualties were light. Since 2006, however, Iran and Syria have provided Hizbullah with an arsenal of perhaps 50,000 missiles and rockets, many with ranges and payloads well beyond what Hizbullah had last time. This marks an extraordinary change in the balance of power. For the first time a radical non-state actor has the power to kill thousands of civilians in Israel’s cities more or less at the press of a button.

In that event, says Israel, it will strike back with double force. A war of this sort could easily draw in Syria, and perhaps Iran. For the moment, deterrence keeps the peace. But a peace maintained by deterrence alone is a frail thing. The shipment to Hizbullah of a balance-tipping new weapon, a skirmish on the Lebanese or increasingly volatile Gaza border—any number of miscalculations could ignite a conflagration…”

READ HERE

-- Yaw-Fish protecting his babies in his mouth.

“The research is outlined in the Jan. 10 Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Using technology known as PRINT (Particle Replication in Non-wetting Templates), scientists produced very soft hydrogel particles that mimic the size, shape, and flexibility of red blood cells, allowing the particles to circulate in the body for extended periods of time.

Tests of the particles’ ability to perform functions such as transporting oxygen or carrying therapeutic drugs have not been conducted, and they do not remain in the cardiovascular system as long as real red blood cells. However, the researchers believe the findings—especially regarding flexibility—are significant because red blood cells naturally deform in order to pass through microscopic pores in organs and narrow blood vessels.

Over their 120-day lifespan, real cells gradually become stiffer and eventually are filtered out of circulation when they can no longer deform enough to pass through pores in the spleen.

Attempts to create effective red blood cell mimics have been limited because the particles tend to be quickly filtered out of circulation due to their inflexibility.

Beyond moving closer to producing fully synthetic blood, the findings could also affect approaches to treating cancer…”

READ HERE

“TOKYO (AFP) – Japanese researchers will launch a project this year to resurrect the long-extinct mammoth by using cloning technology to bring the ancient pachyderm back to life in around five years time.

The researchers will try to revive the species by obtaining tissue this summer from the carcass of a mammoth preserved in a Russian research laboratory, the Yomiuri Shimbun reported.

"Preparations to realize this goal have been made," Akira Iritani, leader of the team and a professor emeritus of Kyoto University, told the mass-circulation daily.

Under the plan, the nuclei of mammoth cells will be inserted into an elephant's egg cell from which the nuclei have been removed, to create an embryo containing mammoth genes, the report said.

The embryo will then be inserted into an elephant's uterus in the hope that the animal will eventually give birth to a baby mammoth.

The elephant is the closest modern relative of the mammoth, a huge woolly mammal believed to have died out with the last Ice Age…”

-- The rumors are now confirmed! Jurassic park here we come!

SEE HERE

“It's an invention that will send a shiver down the spines of pirates everywhere.

A new type of laser weapon effective against moving targets more than a mile away is being developed by British scientists.

Defence company BAE Systems has come up with the non-lethal device in response to the increasing number of commercial, and private, vessels hijacked by pirates off the coast of Somalia.

The laser works by enshrouding the ship using it in a green shroud that leaves the pirates unable to steer a direct course or aim their weapons accurately…”

READ HERE

-- “Maybe I’ll come down! Maybe I won’t! Maybe I’ll come down! Maybe I won’t! Come get me!”

HAHAHA!... "Don't f*ck up my beer, now!"

“Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. Since the dawn of time, roughly a hundred billion human beings have walked the planet Earth.

Now this is an interesting number, for by a curious coincidence there are approximately a hundred billion stars in our local universe, the Milky Way. So for every man who has ever lived, in this Universe there shines a star.

But every one of those stars is a sun, often far more brilliant and glorious than the small, nearby star we call the Sun. And many--perhaps most--of those alien suns have planets circling them. So almost certainly there is enough land in the sky to give every member of the human species, back to the first ape-man, his own private, world-sized heaven--or hell.

How many of those potential heavens and hells are now inhabited, and by what manner of creatures, we have no way of guessing; the very nearest is a million times farther away than Mars or Venus, those still remote goals of the next generation. But the barriers of distance are crumbling; one day we shall meet our equals, or our masters, among the stars.

-- Arthur C. Clarke (Foreword to 2001: A Space Odyssey)