A group of would-be muggers in a Sydney, Australia, met their match Tuesday night in the form of black-clad ninjas.
The three stalked and attacked a German exchange student, 27, in a dimly lit alley that fortunately for the victim ran behind the Ninja Senshi Ryu warrior school…
“The creator of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and some of the most frequently misquoted catchphrases in the English language left behind 5,000 unedited pages of memoirs when he died in 1910, together with handwritten notes saying that he did not want them to hit bookshops for at least a century.
That milestone has now been reached, and in November the University of California, Berkeley, where the manuscript is in a vault, will release the first volume of Mark Twain’s autobiography. The eventual trilogy will run to half a million words, and shed new light on the quintessentially American novelist.”
Well the good people running George’s estate, Mount Vernon, have returned a copy of the same edition of the book to the library. (But not the fine—which would be in the neighborhood of $300,000.)
Last night CBS Evening News aired a segment on the oil spill and included a clip of BP contractors turning the CBS crew away from investigating part of the oil-drenched Louisiana shoreline under threat of being arrested if they proceeded. The contractor, or a Coast Guard…it’s not quite clear, told CBS that they were merely enforcing BP’s rules.
BP’s rules? That was a public beach! Unbelievable!
“The other thing is that I write very slowly—painfully slowly—and while yes, I really want it to look spontaneous and random, generally I’ll spend a lot of time just on the first joke, till it seems right, and then I’ll think, OK, what would be a good one to go after that. At that point I’m really not thinking about how it’s going to end or how it’s going to be structured—only about what the next joke will be. And then the next joke after that.”
I was just reading “Plunges Into Canada” (love it, but the way), and I came accross the story about Gander the dog. Well, I was in Ottawa in August ’09 for the Hong Kong Veterans Memorial Wall unveiling (my grandpa was a P.O.W) and there was a bunch of… memorabilia, I guess you’d call it, about the war time. I took the following pictures that I thought I would share.
Really appreciate it, Tasha, must have been quite a trip. Here’s that photo of Sergeant Gander:
That is one good looking dog. And from Plunges Into Canada (page 37)—here’s the truly amazing story of Sergeant Gander:
The New York Times reports that the last of the chorus girls from the one-time American entertainment institution, the Ziegfeld Follies, has died:
“For a quarter century, Florenz Ziegfeld auditioned hundreds of thousands of young women vying to become chorus girls, the Ziegfeld Girls, those lace and chiffon visions of glamour who were as much a part of the Jazz Age as Stutz Bearcats, the Charleston and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
In all, from 1907 to 1931, he picked about 3,000, and on Tuesday the last Ziegfeld Girl died. She was Doris Eaton Travis, and she was 106.”
She had quite a story:
Mrs. Travis may have been the youngest Ziegfeld Girl ever, having lied about her age to begin dancing at 14. She was part of a celebrated family of American stage performers known as “the seven little Eatons.” George Gershwin played on her family’s piano, and Charles Lindbergh dropped by for “tea,” Prohibition cocktails.
And she kept on dancing until she was 104, and even appeared at a charity event just two weeks ago.
• Here’s a book that was written about Mrs. Travis in 2006, Century Girl:
Similar in approach to a graphic novel, this biography-in-collage tackles the life of Ziegfeld Follies star Doris Eaton. Each page offers a wild mix of illustrations, doodles, photos and memorabilia from Eaton’s archives, accompanied by handwritten text outlining her fascinating life, which comes across like something out of the musical Gypsy.
Jupiter has lost one of its prominent stripes, leaving its southern half looking unusually blank. […]
The band was present at the end of 2009, right before Jupiter moved too close to the sun in the sky to be observed from Earth. When the planet emerged from the sun’s glare again in early April, its south equatorial belt was nowhere to be seen.
Over at our Facebook page a commenter left an email address where people could send ideas to help with the Gulf oil spill – and what a great idea! (Thanks, Krazy Wild Mann.) That led us to do some snooping, and we found several places where people can find out how they can help, whether by reporting finding oiled birds if you’re in the Gulf region, or contributing to cleanup funding efforts. So here goes.
It sounds to us like BP is now grasping at straws trying to outsmart the growing gulf coast oil spill. As their next plan of action engineers will shoot a pile of trash at high speed into the blowout preventer at the site of the leak on the ocean floor. Experts in the oil field call this maneuver the “junk shot”.
Personnel were quickly deployed and approximately 10,000 are currently responding to protect the shoreline and wildlife.
More than 290 vessels are responding on site, including skimmers, tugs, barges, and recovery vessels to assist in containment and cleanup efforts—in addition to dozens of aircraft, remotely operated vehicles, and multiple mobile offshore drilling units.
More than 1 million feet of boom (regular and sorbent) have been deployed to contain the spill—and more than 1.3 million feet are available.
Nearly 3.5 million gallons of an oil-water mix have been recovered.
Approximately 325,000 gallons of dispersant have been deployed. More than 500,000 gallons are available.
And here’s a great graphic illustrating what they’re trying to do with relief wells. (They’ll take months to work at least.) Click for a really large picture:
The “toilet paper bandit” who allegedly robbed a Lincoln convenience store last month has made headlines in newspapers as far away as London and on the Drudge Report.
His fame may have been short-lived, however.
Joshua Nelson, 29, of 121 E St. was arrested Saturday evening for robbery and use of a weapon to commit a felony.
On April 24, Nelson allegedly entered Kabredlo’s at 1445 S. 17th St. armed with a knife and demanded money.
The robber had toilet paper wrapped around his head to conceal his identity.
Let’s say you’re walking down the sidewalk dressed in an ordinary skirt and—Here come the bad guys! And they’re chasing you! Run! Hide! Too bad you weren’t wearing this special piece of clothing: The Vending Machine Skirt, by Tokyo designer Aya Tsukiokais. It looks like a normal skirt, but, when you need to become invisible, it quickly unfolds to become a large, rectangular piece of cloth that looks just like a soda vending machine. Just hold it in front of you and hide behind it, so the idea goes, and you’ll blend into the scenery. “Vending machines are on every corner of Japanese streets, and we take it for granted,” says Aya. “That’s how I came up with the idea for this dress.”
And now, because you deserve it, a video demonstration of the Vending Machine Skirt by Ms. Tsukiokais, with a bonus demonstration of her Manhole Cover Purse:
The Japanese mission Hayabusa (“Falcon”) has been nothing if not ambitious. Launched in 2004, it reached the bizarre asteroid Itokawa a little over a year later. It took phenomenal images and other measurements, and even landed on the asteroid itself to take samples, destined to be returned to Earth.
But it has suffered a series of crippling mishaps that have threatened the mission time and again with failure. However, despite all that, the end game is in sight: Hayabusa is almost back home, and on June 13, sometime around 14:00 UT, the sample recovery capsule will parachute down to the Earth.
The newest addition to our Plunges Into series, Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Plunges into Canada, eh has hit store shelves. We’ve already heard some rave reviews from fans that have purchased the book. Share your thoughts in the comments section. Meanwhile, here is a little information about the book:
