Offbeat News

[Jet]

Superman's debut comic book sells for super-record price.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100222/...an_first_issue

[Jet]

Wall in Jerusalem excavated in support of the bible accounts

It would be cool to be an archeologist.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/ml_israel_ancient_wall

[Jet]

Loveless marriage ban. Funny from the onion...

http://video.yahoo.com/network/10028...1105&l=4418225

[Jet]

What it takes to keep Oasis afloat



The ship is five times the size of Titanic.
More...

http://finance.yahoo.com/family-home...=family-travel

[Soon]

Raining Fish

[Jet]

Deep Sea Creature Surfaces, Causes Stir


Includes link to pictures, wow.

Think sharks are scary? They're downright cuddly compared to the Bathynomus giganteus, a very terrifying (and very real) sea creature that recently surfaced from the deep. More.....
http://buzz.yahoo.com/buzzlog/93524?fp=1

[Apocalipstic]

Originally Posted by Jet

Deep Sea Creature Surfaces, Causes Stir


Includes link to pictures, wow.

Think sharks are scary? They're downright cuddly compared to the Bathynomus giganteus, a very terrifying (and very real) sea creature that recently surfaced from the deep. More.....
http://buzz.yahoo.com/buzzlog/93524?fp=1

It looks like the love child of an armadillo and a cockroach.

[Jet]

The Vanishing Aral Sea; Shocking Disaster


The drying up of the Aral Sea is one of the planet's most shocking environmental disasters, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Sunday as he urged Central Asian leaders to step up efforts to solve the problem.

More....

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100404/...n_central_asia

[Jet]

Surgery scheduled for boy with extra fingers and toes

[Jet]

GLOBAL WARMING GREAT FOR TREES

http://news.yahoo.com/video/environm...49659/19147410


A New Look at the Sun

New footage of the sun may help scientists better understand climate change.
Video of incredible pictures of the sun as it really looks close-up.....

http://news.yahoo.com/video/environm...49659/19271005

[Jet]

Endangered pre-historic sturgeon fish make a comeback

It's been a tough fight for the whisker-snouted sturgeon.
The fish survived whatever killed the dinosaurs and have struggled against habitat destruction and overfishing.
Now many of its 25 species are endangered, but a small pocket in upper Wisconsin boasts
of having one of the world's largest concentrations of the fish.
More....video and pics

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_saving_sturgeon

[Cyclopea]

From The Idaho Statesman:
Death of 'Caveman' ends an era in Idaho
Richard Zimmerman, known to all as Dugout Dick, succumbs at 94
BY TIM WOODWARD 04/23/10

Born Richard Zimmerman, he was the last of Idaho's legendary loners. Zimmerman died Wednesday.

Known as the "Salmon River Caveman," Richard Zimmerman lived an essentially 19th century lifestyle, a digital-age anachronism who never owned a telephone or a television and lived almost entirely off the land.

"He was in his home at the caves at the end, and it was his wish to die there," said Connie Fitte, who lived across the river. "He was the epitome of the free spirit."

Richard Zimmerman had been in declining health when he died Wednesday.

Few knew him by his given name. To friends and visitors to his jumble of cave-like homes scrabbled from a rocky shoulder of the Salmon River, he was Dugout Dick.

He was the last of Idaho's river-canyon loners that date back to Territorial days. They are a unique group that until the 1980s included canyon contemporaries with names like Beaver Dick, Cougar Dave and Wheelbarrow Annie, "Buckskin Bill" (real name Sylvan Hart) and "Free Press Frances" Wisner. Fiercely independent loners, they lived eccentric lives on their own terms and made the state more interesting just by being here.

Most, like Zimmerman, came from someplace else. Drawn by Idaho's remoteness and wild places removed from social pressures, they came and spent their lives here, leaving only in death.

Some became reluctant celebrities, interviewed about their unusual lifestyles and courted by media heavyweights. Zimmerman was featured in National Geographic magazine and spurned repeated invitations to appear on the "Tonight Show."

"I ride Greyhounds, not airplanes," he said in a 1993 Statesman interview. "Besides, the show isn't in California. The show is here."

Cort Conley, who included Zimmerman in his 1994 book "Idaho Loners", said that "like Thoreau, he often must have smiled at how much he didn't need. É What gave him uncommon grace and dignity for me were his spiritual life, his musical artistry, his unperturbed acceptance of life as it is, and being a WWII veteran who had served his country and harbored no expectations in return."

His metamorphisis to Dugout Dick began when he crossed a wooden bridge over the Salmon River in 1947 and built a makeshift home on the side of a hill. He spent the rest of his life there, fashioning one cavelike dwelling after another, furnishing them with castoff doors, car windows, old tires and other leavings.

"I have everything here," he said. "I got lots of rocks and rubber tires. I have plenty of straw and fruit and vegetables, my dog and my cats and my guitars. I make wine to cook with. There's nothing I really need."

Some of his caves were 60 feet deep. Though he "never meant to build an apartment house," he earned spending money by renting them for $2 a night. Some renters spent one night; others chose the $25 monthly rate and stayed for months or years.

He lived in a cave by choice. Moved by a friend to a care center in Salmon at age 93 because he was in failing health, he walked out and hitchhiked home.

Bruce Long, who rented one of his caves and looked after him, said the care center "had bingo and TV, but things like that held no interest for him. He just wanted to live in his cave.

"People said he was the only person they'd ever known who was absolutely self-sufficient. He didn't work for anybody. He worked for himself."

Born in Indiana in 1916, Zimmerman grew up on farms in Indiana and Michigan, the son of a moonshiner with a mean streak. He rebelled against his domineering father and ran away at a young age, riding the rails west and learning the hobo songs he later would play on a battered guitar for guests at his caves.

He punched cows and worked as a farmhand, settling in Idaho's Lemhi Valley in 1937 and making ends meet by cutting firewood and herding sheep. In 1942, he joined the Army and served as a truck driver in the Pacific during World War II. When his service ended, he returned to Idaho and never left.

He raised goats and chickens, tended a bountiful vegetable garden and orchard and stored what he couldn't eat or sell in a root cellar. A lifelong victim of a quarrelsome stomach, he survived largely on what he could grow or make. Homemade yogurt ranked among his proudest achievements.

He was married once, briefly, to a pen-pal bride from Mexico. The other woman in his life, Bonnie Trositt, tired of life in a cave, left him for a job as a potato sorter and was murdered by her roommate. He claimed to see her spirit in the flickering light of a kerosene lamp on the cave walls.

He rarely went to church, but read and quoted continually from the Bible.

Services are pending. A brother, Raymond Zimmerman, has requested that his remains be sent to Illinois.

Read more: http://www.idahostatesman.com/2010/0...#ixzz0lxcew600

[Jet]

The country's most polluted cities in 2010

http://realestate.yahoo.com/promo/am...ed-cities-2010

[betenoire]

Russian Professor Predicts End of U.S.

[Jet]

Nicholas Cage buys himself a pyramid...amid.....financial woes....

Full story....

http://omg.yahoo.com/blogs/a-line/ni...yramid/462/?nc

[MissItalianDiva]

Jet I love reading these ty! I just finished reading this on Yahoo...smh I am not sure what has gotten into Cage...he must have lost it somewhere along the line.

[Mister Bent]

Originally Posted by betenoire

Russian Professor Predicts End of U.S.

He's a Jehovah's Witless?

[SuperFemme]

Weird News: Stephen Hawking Says Aliens Would Eat Us

http://www.tv.com/weird-news-stephen...ews/71336.html

[Rook]

WATERPERRY, England (AFP) - Britain's iconic red phone boxes have become obsolete in the age of the mobile -- but villages across the country are stepping in to save them, with creative flair.

Whether as a place to exhibit art, poetry, or even as a tiny library, hundreds of kiosks have been given a new lease of life by local communities determined to preserve a quintessential part of British life.

In Waterperry, a small village near Oxford, the 120 residents have filled the phone box next to the old manor house with a pot of hyacinths, piles of gardening and cooking magazines, and plastered poems on the walls.

They took control of the kiosk when telecoms operator BT said it was going to pull it down, an announcement that sparked such uproar that one local woman threatened to chain herself to the box to save it.

"I'd have done it," insisted Kendall Turner. "It would have been heartbreaking for the village."

Local councillor Tricia Hallam, who came up with the idea for the phone box's makeover, said "quite a few people" would have joined her, adding: "We couldn't let it go because it's a landmark, it's part of our heritage.

"We need to keep it here, it's an iconic thing, a British icon."

Only three feet (90 centimetres) by three feet wide, and standing eight foot three inches (2.51 metres) tall, the kiosks were designed by Giles Gilbert Scott in 1936 for the 25th anniversary of the reign of King George V.

Painted in "Post Office red" to match the post boxes, they were once a defining image of England and the backdrop to millions of tourist photographs.

Eight years ago there were about 17,000 across Britain, but today, in a country where almost everybody has a mobile phone, 58 percent are no longer profitable and ten percent are only used once a month.

"On average, maintaining them costs 800 pounds a year per kiosk," said John Lumb, general manager for BT Payphones -- about 44 million pounds annually.

Some phone boxes have been converted into kitsch showers or mini-bars, available online for between 1,300 and 3,500 pounds (2,000 and 5,400 dollars, 1,500 and 3,900 euros).

But BT needed a bigger solution and, two years ago, wrote to local authorities to inform them the boxes were going to be dismantled.

"We probably had 100 letters back from the councils asking if they could keep the red kiosk... There were just so many people saying that in small villages, it had been part of their landscape for years," Lumb told AFP.

"The red kiosk is just well recognised within the UK, just like the black taxis. There are quite strong feelings about it in many picturesque villages."

In response, BT launched the "Adopt A Kiosk" programme, allowing local authorities to buy their box for a symbolic one pound.

Since August 2008, 1,118 have been taken over, with a further 4,000 scrapped, and such was the enthusiasm that a competition was launched for the "best adoptive parent".

Last year's winner was the village of Great Shelford near Cambridge in eastern England, whose box is located in a conservation zone between a cemetery and centuries-old thatched cottages.

A mannequin created by the local primary school stands guard inside, changing each month. This month's occupant is the Greek goddess Hera.

Westbury-sub-Mendip, in the southwestern county of Somerset, has also lavished attention on its local phone box, turning it into a library -- "the smallest in the world", according to the 800 proud residents.

"The concept is delightfully simple," says parish councillor Bob Dolby, explaining how residents use it to swap books any time of the day or night.

The box "now houses a different form of communication having moved from the spoken word to the written word", he said.

"In this way the kiosk, which has served the community well for many years, will continue to serve it for years to come."

http://ca.rss.news.yahoo.com/s/afp/1...ations_offbeat

[Rook]

Ligers, tigons and grolar bears, oh my! Take a look at some of these otherworldly hybrid animals and you'll realize the possibilities are endless.

Though they rarely occur in nature, individuals from different but closely related species do occasionally mate, and the result is a biological hybrid — an offspring that shares traits from both parent species. You may have heard of the mysterious sheep-pig creature, but it turns out that one isn't a true hybrid.

Here are six bizarre, but truly unique half-breeds.


Zebroids

A zebroid is the offspring of a cross between a zebra and any other equine, usually a horse or a donkey. There are zorses, zonkeys, zonies, and a host of other combinations.

Zebroids are an interesting example of hybrids bred from species that have a radically different number of chromosomes. For instance, horses have 64 chromosomes and zebra have between 32 and 44 (depending on species). Even so, nature finds a way.






Savannah cats

Savannah cats are the name given to the offspring of a domestic cat and a serval — a medium-sized, large-eared wild African cat. The unusual cross became popular among breeders at the end of the 20th century, and in 2001 the International Cat Association accepted it as a new registered breed.

Interestingly, savannahs are much more social than typical domestic cats, and they are often compared to dogs in their loyalty. They can be trained to walk on a leash and even taught to play fetch.






Ligers

Ligers are the cross of a male lion and a female tiger, and they are the largest of all living cats and felines. Their massive size may be a result of imprinted genes which are not fully expressed in their parents, but are left unchecked when the two different species mate. Some female ligers can grow to 10 feet in length and weigh more than 700 pounds.

Ligers are distinct from tigons, which come from a female lion and male tiger. Various other big cat hybrids have been created too, including leopons (a leopard and a lion mix), jaguleps (a jaguar and leopard mix), and even lijaguleps (a lion and jagulep mix).





Wholphins

A cross between a false killer whale and an Atlantic bottlenose dolphin, wholphins are hybrids that have been reported to exist in the wild. There are currently two in captivity, both at Sea Life Park in Hawaii.

The wholphin's size, color, and shape are intermediate between the parent species. Even their number of teeth is mixed; a bottlenose has 88 teeth, a false killer whale has 44 teeth, and a wholphin has 66.






Grolar bears

The offspring of a grizzly bear and a polar bear, a grolar bear is one beast you don't want to meet in the woods. Interestingly, unlike many hybrid animals on this list, grolar bears are known to occur naturally in the wild.

Some experts predict that polar bears may be driven to breed with grizzly bears at an increased frequency due to global warming, and the fact that polar bears are being forced from their natural habitats on the polar ice.





Beefalo

Beefalo are the fertile offspring of domestic cattle and American bison. Crosses also exist between domestic cattle and European bison (zubrons) and yaks (yakows). The name given to beefalo might be the most suggestive, since the breed was purposely created to combine the best characteristics of both animals with an eye towards beef production.

A USDA study showed that beefalo meat, like bison meat, tends to be lower in fat and cholesterol. They are also thought to produce less damage to range-land than cattle.