Don't bend over in the garden Granny; those taters have eyes

Every time I play with a Mister Potatohead, I think of my childhood and of course, Lewis Grizzard - mainly because of his book "Don't Bend Over in the Garden, Granny, You Know Them Taters Got Eyes"

Saturday evening, Some friends of mine and I had some fun with Mister Potatohead after dinner; to the left are the results.

For those of you who don't know about Lewis Grizzard, Lewis McDonald Grizzard, Jr. was a popular and sometimes controversial newspaper columnist who gained fame in the 1980s and 1990s with his popular syndicated newspaper column. Throughout his career, Grizzard's wit entertained readers with a commentary that was unabashedly pro-Southern.

His love for his alma mater, the University of Georgia, his attitude toward Yankees, and his well-known marital failures all provided material for his columns, numerous books, audiocassettes, and personal and television appearances. But it was in his life-and-death struggle with heart disease that he touched the hearts of his loyal readers.

Grizzard grew up in the small town of Moreland, Georgia, where he had been born on October 20, 1947. He attended the University of Georgia in Athens, but because he accepted a job with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in his senior year, he did not graduate until years later. Despite his delayed graduation, Grizzard was awarded the distinguished alumni award from his alma mater's College of Journalism and Mass Communication.

The Georgia-born humorist and best-selling author conveyed the ambivalence of many white southerners who embraced the economic and material benefits of Sunbelt prosperity while remaining skeptical and sometimes resentful of some of the social and political changes that accompanied these gains.

Born in Fort Benning on October 20, 1946, Lewis McDonald Grizzard Jr. grew up in Moreland, where he moved with his schoolteacher mother,

Grizzard

Christine, after his father, army captain Lewis McDonald Grizzard Sr., left them. (Grizzard later memorialized his parents in his books My Daddy Was a Pistol and I'm a Son of a Gun [1986] and Don't Forget to Call Your Mama—I Wish I Could Call Mine [1991].) While a student at the University of Georgia (UGA), he served as sports editor of the Athens Daily News and went on to become the executive sports editor of the Atlanta Journal at age twenty-three. He endured an unhappy stint with the Chicago Sun Times, which he chronicled in If I Ever Get Back to Georgia, I'm Gonna Nail My Feet to the Ground (1990). In 1977 he returned to his home state and soon began to write a regional color column for the Atlanta Constitution that was eventually syndicated in about 450 newspapers. Compilations of those columns formed the basis for many of his twenty-five books on a variety of subjects, from women and religion to golf and UGA football. Many of these were best sellers, including Elvis Is Dead and I Don't Feel So Good Myself (1984), Chili Dawgs Always Bark at Night (1989), and the posthumously published Southern by the Grace of God (1996).

In the self-deprecatory tradition of southern humorists, Grizzard often called himself a redneck,

Lewis Grizzard

but as journalist Peter Applebome has observed, he was actually "the patron saint of the new suburban South, where you could have both the values of the old general store and the designer label wares of the megamalls." He lived in Atlanta's exclusive Ansley Park, his footwear of choice was Gucci loafers (worn without socks), he was partial to Geoffrey Beene cologne, and he used the gun rack behind the seat of his truck to hold his golf clubs. Although he protested that he liked pork barbecue much better, he owned up to eating caviar at Maxim's in Paris and even to visiting the Louvre Museum.

Grizzard was at his best regaling audiences with stories of "rat-killings" in Moreland or discussing the subtleties of the southern pronunciation of "nekkid," but his country-boy perspective shaped his reaction to all of his personal experiences even as he became a national and international celebrity. In a humorous story entitled "There Ain't No Toilet Paper in Russia," he described Peter the Great's palace as "fifteen times bigger than Opryland."

If Grizzard's humor revealed the ambivalence amid affluence of the Sunbelt South, it reflected its conservative and increasingly angry politics as well. He was fond of reminding fault-finding Yankee immigrants that "Delta is ready when you are," and, tired of assaults on the Confederate flag, he suggested sarcastically that white southerners should destroy every relic and reminder of the Civil War, swear off molasses and grits, drop all references to the South, and begin instead to refer to their region as the "Lower East."

His love for his alma mater, the University of Georgia, his attitude toward Yankees, and his well-known marital failures all provided material for his columns, numerous books, audiocassettes, and personal and television appearances. But it was in his life-and-death struggle with heart disease that he touched the hearts of his loyal readers.

In the end, which came in 1994, when he was only forty-seven, the lonely, insecure, oft-divorced, hard-drinking Grizzard proved to be the archetypal comic who could make everyone laugh but himself. He chronicled this decline and his various heart surgeries in I Took a Lickin' and Kept on Tickin', and Now I Believe in Miracles (1993), published just before his final, fatal heart failure.

Ironically, Moreland now boasts museums honoring both him and native son Erskine Caldwell, whose darkly critical vision of the South helped to bring on the changes that Grizzard and his generation of white southerners both embraced and bemoaned.

We all have times we catch up on memories of our childhood and catch up on memories of the people who have passed. Tonight was one of those nights for me after playing with Mister P.

Take care Lewis. You are still missed.

Walter

'The Other Boleyn Girl'

Sexy flick tells torrid historical tale...
Sisters Anne (Natalie Portman, left) and Mary Boleyn (Scarlett Johansson, right)
are rivals for the love of King Henry VIII in "The Other Boleyn Girl."

Last Friday, I took a wonderful woman to a movie, and while the choice of movies these days can be a crap shoot (especially if you want a movie in good taste for mixed company), I'd have to say, her choice was a really good one.

Considering its lucrative love affair with English monarchs, Hollywood should start paying -- as well as filming -- royalties. If the Tudors and Windsors had a shilling for every movie about them, their exchequers would runneth over.

Instead, the big bucks and plentiful pounds are going to screenwriter Peter Morgan and novelist Philippa Gregory for "The Other Boleyn Girl," the latest, sexiest historical romance about Henry VIII and his most controversial wife -- plus her sister.

In Gregory's telling, and in fact, both beautiful Boleyn sisters competed for Henry's love and boudoir. But only one of them wanted his queen's crown.

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"The Other Boleyn Girl"

• Starring: Natalie Portman, Scarlett Johansson
• Rating: PG-13 for mature thematic elements, sexual content and violent images.
• 
  3 1/2 stars = Very good
  
• Web site: sonypictures.com

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An opening montage establishes their idyllic childhood, and director Justin Chadwick hustles us along briskly thereafter: Sir Thomas Boleyn (Mark Rylance) allows shy daughter Mary (Scarlett Johansson) to wed a local merchant's son but has higher ambitions for the feistier Anne (Natalie Portman).

"An opportunity has arisen," he says, deceptively mild and understated as always. Everyone knows that Queen Katherine (Ana Torrent) has long failed to give King Henry a male heir. Sir Thomas invites the king for a hunting visit, instructing Anne to "beguile and divert" him.

Henry comes, sees, but is beguiled and conquered by Mary instead. She, not Anne, is summoned to the court as the royal mistress -- without protest from her acquiescent husband.

The subsequent first love scene between Henry and Mary is one of the film's most exquisite moments, its gentle eroticism slowly rising to a sensual boil. Clearly, these two are lovers. Soon, they'll be parents.

Furious Anne is packed off to cool her heels (and improve her seductive skills) in France. She returns -- in costume designer Sandy Powell's dazzling green creation, clashing loudly with the muted royal color scheme -- when Henry is starting to get bored with Mary, just in time to tease, taunt and lure him away from her sister.

Talk about sibling rivalry. This is as ruthless as it gets. Mary has genuine affection for Henry but is banished, along with the king's illegitimate son. Anne has genuine ambition to be nothing less than Queen of England -- and won't sleep with Hank until he makes it happen.

An annulment is needed, but neither the Church nor Katherine of Aragon will cooperate, which leads to the cataclysmic break with Rome. Henry is facing the two most stubborn women of the 16th century, and England is torn apart by the inevitable intrigues, betrayals and beheadings to come.

Portman and Johansson are dynamic diametric opposites in their roles -- so good that it's unclear which one should be considered the "other" Boleyn girl of the title. Johansson's Mary is the reticent, restrained, emotional heart of the story, throughout which her stunningly lovely face is framed and lighted like a Vermeer.

Dazzling, high-spirited Portman, for her ill-fated part, looks and acts not unlike that other Scarlett girl -- the O'Hara one, as played by Vivien Leigh.

Rylance plays their slimy, despicable father in a nauseously low-key manner, while Kristin Scott Thomas as his disapproving wife fumes. ("When was it that ambition stopped being a sin and became a virtue?")

Torrent is tragically dignified and sympathetic as the discarded Queen Katherine.

Only Eric Bana's moody Henry struck me as wrong. No man, let alone this legendary absolute autocrat, would stay so wimpily enthralled with a gal like Anne, allowing her to withhold sex for eight years, right?

Wrong. He did. He was wildly in love. He wrote her love poems and songs, and sang them to her personally.

Morgan's script deserves credit for simplifying the tangled web of Tudor politics without dumbing it down, but he and/or novelist Gregory have taken several huge liberties with the (for the most part) historical facts. The author tells us Mary "chose to leave court and marry to suit herself." The screenwriter has her banished by Anne's conspiracy.

Worse, and more important if you care about factoids: Mary Boleyn did not bear Henry VIII's illegitimate son. His one and only other documented mistress -- Bessie Blount, by name! -- did so.

So much for pedantry. Director Justin Chadwick is more interested in pageantry, and rightly so. The film is gorgeous, though it wants to be more epic than it is. There's a bit too much bodice-ripping "Days of Our Royal Lives" material, while the great church battle gets short shrift.

Never mind. It's wonderful entertainment, if not wonderful history.

In the end, neither Popes Julius II nor Clement VII would buy Henry's annulment arguments. And when her time came, Henry's kangaroo court wouldn't buy Anne's. Her trial (for adultery and incest) gets about a minute and a half of screen time, hurried and truncated -- rather like Anne.

Definitely a movie worth looking into, seeing and remembering later.

Walter

New Sleep Survey

One-third of US workforce are so sleepy, they could sleep on the job - National Sleep Foundation Survey

About a third of those surveyed say they have fallen asleep or become sleepy at work in the last month. The survey of 1,000 people found participants average six hours and 40 minutes of sleep a night on weeknights, even though they estimated they'd need roughly another 40 minutes of sleep to be at their best. Roughly one-third of those surveyed said they had fallen asleep or become very sleepy at work in the past month.

Just how big a deal that is depends, of course, on your job.

Last week, the chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission acknowledged it should have done more to investigate a tip that security guards routinely took naps while on the job at a Pennsylvania nuclear plant.

It wasn't until a videotape of guards sleeping in a "ready room" at the Peach Bottom plant in south-central Pennsylvania surfaced several months after it got the tip that the NRC announced in September a special investigation.

While sleepy workers know they're not performing as well as they could during the day, work is what's keeping them up nights, according to the survey, which found workdays are getting longer and time spent working from home averages close to four-and-a-half hours each week.

It seems people are also trying to squeeze in more time for themselves and their families, even if it means less sleep.

The average wake up is at 5:35 a.m. and it's followed by about two hours and 15 minutes at home before heading out to work, according to the survey. Average bedtime is 10:53.

Source: AP.

Notable Link: National Sleep Foundation

Lucy, Ethel & lots of candy

One of my favorite Lucy episodes. Enjoy...Mmmmmmm!

Sea reptile is biggest on record

Sea reptile is biggest on record

By Paul Rincon Science reporter, BBC News

A fossilised "sea monster" unearthed on an Arctic island is the largest marine reptile known to science, Norwegian scientists have announced.

The 150 million-year-old specimen was found on Spitspergen, in the Arctic island chain of Svalbard, in 2006.

The Jurassic-era leviathan is one of 40 sea reptiles from a fossil "treasure trove" uncovered on the island.

Nicknamed "The Monster", the immense creature would have measured 15m (50ft) from nose to tail.

A large pliosaur was big enough to pick up a small car in its jaws and bite it in half Richard Forrest, plesiosaur palaeontologist

And during the last field expedition, scientists discovered the remains of another so-called pliosaur which is thought to belong to the same species as The Monster - and may have been just as colossal.

The expedition's director Dr Jorn Hurum, from the University of Oslo Natural History Museum, said the Svalbard specimen is 20% larger than the previous biggest marine reptile - another massive pliosaur from Australia called Kronosaurus.

"We have carried out a search of the literature, so we now know that we have the biggest [pliosaur]. It's not just arm-waving anymore," Dr Hurum told the BBC News website.

"The flipper is 3m long with very few parts missing. On Monday, we assembled all the bones in our basement and we amazed ourselves - we had never seen it together before."

The Monster's flipper alone measures 3m in length

Pliosaurs were a short-necked form of plesiosaur, a group of extinct reptiles that lived in the world's oceans during the age of the dinosaurs.

A pliosaur's body was tear drop-shaped with two sets of powerful flippers which it used to propel itself through the water.

"These animals were awesomely powerful predators," said plesiosaur palaeontologist Richard Forrest.

A second large pliosaur has now been found on the Arctic island Enlarge Image

"If you compare the skull of a large pliosaur to a crocodile, it is very clear it is much better built for biting... by comparison with a crocodile, you have something like three or four times the cross-sectional space for muscles. So you have much bigger, more powerful muscles and huge, robust jaws.

"A large pliosaur was big enough to pick up a small car in its jaws and bite it in half."

"There are a few isolated bones of huge pliosaurs already known but this is the first find of a significant portion of a whole skeleton of such a giant," said Angela Milner, associate keeper of palaeontology at London's Natural History Museum

"It will undoubtedly add much to our knowledge of these top marine predators. Pliosaurs were reptiles and they were almost certainly not warm-blooded so this discovery is also a good demonstration of plate tectonics and ancient climates.

'Monster' fossil find in Arctic

"One hundred and fifty million years ago, Svalbard was not so near the North Pole, there was no ice cap and the climate was much warmer than it is today."

The Monster was excavated in August 2007 and taken to the Natural History Museum in Oslo. Team members had to remove hundreds of tonnes of rock by hand in high winds, fog, rain, freezing temperatures and with the constant threat of attack by polar bears.

They recovered the animal's snout, some teeth, much of the neck and back, the shoulder girdle and a nearly complete flipper.

Unfortunately, there was a small river running through where the head lay, so much of the skull had been washed away.

A preliminary analysis of the bones suggests this beast belongs to a previously unknown species.

Unprecedented haul

The researchers plan to return to Svalbard later this year to excavate the new pliosaur.

A few skull pieces, broken teeth and vertebrae from this second large specimen are already exposed and plenty more may be waiting to be excavated.

"It's a large one, and has the same bone structure as the previous one we found," said Espen Knutsen, from Oslo's Natural History Museum, who is studying the fossils.

Excavations have also yielded long-necked plesiosaurs

Dr Hurum and his colleagues have now identified a total of 40 marine reptiles from Svalbard. The haul includes many long-necked plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs in addition to the two pliosaurs.

Long-necked plesiosaurs are said to fit descriptions of Scotland's mythical Loch Ness monster. Ichthyosaurs bore a passing resemblance to modern dolphins, but they used an upright tail fin to propel themselves through the water.

Richard Forrest commented: "Here in Svalbard you have 40 specimens just lying around, which is like nothing we know.

The 2007 fieldwork took place in challenging conditions

"Even in classic fossil exposures such as you have in Dorset [in England], there are cliffs eroding over many years and every so often something pops up. But we haven't had 40 plesiosaurs from Dorset in 200 years."

The fossils were found in a fine-grained sedimentary rock called black shale. When the animals died, they sank to the bottom of a cold, shallow Jurassic sea and were covered over by mud. The oxygen-free, alkaline chemistry of the mud may explain the fossils' remarkable preservation, said Dr Hurum.

The discovery of another large pliosaur was announced in 2002. Known as the "Monster of Aramberri" after the site in north-eastern Mexico where it was dug up, the creature could be just as big as the Svalbard specimen, according to the team that found it.

But palaeontologists told the BBC a much more detailed analysis of these fossils was required before a true picture of its size could be obtained.

Cherry Blossom Festival

There are close to a dozen Cherry Blossom festivals in the U.S. and I've been to several of them, especially the big ones in Washington D.C. and New York. If you get the chance, check out this year's festival in Macon, Georgia. This particular festival takes place March 28-April 6, so I suggest you set some time aside to see this beautiful annual event. During the week of the Festival, I'll be uploading some spectacular pictures of the trees and the events, so bookmark this blog, if you like.

Apologize for Slavery? Huh?

RICHMOND, Va. - Meeting on the grounds of the former Confederate Capitol, the Virginia General Assembly voted unanimously Saturday to express “profound regret” for the state’s role in slavery.

Sponsors of the resolution say they know of no other state that has apologized for slavery, although Missouri lawmakers are considering such a measure. The resolution does not carry the weight of law but sends an important symbolic message, supporters said.

“This session will be remembered for a lot of things, but 20 years hence I suspect one of those things will be the fact that we came together and passed this resolution,” said Delegate A. Donald McEachin, a Democrat who sponsored it in the House of Delegates.

The resolution passed the House 96-0 and cleared the 40-member Senate on a unanimous voice vote. It does not require Gov. Timothy M. Kaine’s approval.

The measure also expressed regret for “the exploitation of Native Americans.”

The resolution was introduced as Virginia begins its celebration of the 400th anniversary of Jamestown, where the first Africans arrived in 1619. Richmond, home to a popular boulevard lined with statues of Confederate heroes, later became another point of arrival for Africans and a slave-trade hub.

‘Insidious institutions and practices’
The resolution says government-sanctioned slavery “ranks as the most horrendous of all depredations of human rights and violations of our founding ideals in our nation’s history, and the abolition of slavery was followed by systematic discrimination, enforced segregation, and other insidious institutions and practices toward Americans of African descent that were rooted in racism, racial bias, and racial misunderstanding.”

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The Case Against Reparations

David Horowitz’s widely debated “10 reasons why reparations for blacks is a bad idea for blacks--and racist, too.” is an interesting line of thinking. The most persuasive points include:

• No one racial group is responsible for the crime of slavery. Slavery predated the arrival of white Europeans in Africa; blacks in Africa and even in the U.S. participated in the slave trade.

• Only a tiny minority of antebellum white Americans--about 5 percent of Southern whites--ever owned slaves.

• Most Americans today arrived in the U.S. after 1860 or are descended from immigrants who arrived after 1860, and so have no connection, direct or indirect, to slavery.

• Reparations paid to other oppressed groups are not valid precedents for making reparations for slavery, because in those cases the survivors or their immediate families were still living, or there were treaties involved.

• Not all black American descendants of slaves suffer from slavery’s consequences; most are now solidly middle income or higher.

• Reparations is another case of blaming whites for the problems afflicting the black community, which fuels a “victim” mentality.

• Reparations to black Americans already have been paid through trillions of dollars spent on social welfare and racial preference programs.

At the same time, there are flaws and gaps. First, if reparations for slavery are owed by anyone, they are owed by governments and not individuals or businesses, since slavery was legal at the time. The number of whites who actually owned slaves is irrelevant.

Second, reparations from governments probably were legally owed and due when slavery ended in 1865. Had racism not prevented justice from being done, real victims could have been named, and “forty acres and a mule” or some other measure of restitution would have been awarded.

Third, the moral weight of the case for reparations stands regardless of the race or color of its perpetrators and victims. We talk in shorthand about “what America owes blacks” because virtually all slaves in America were black and nearly all slaveowners were white. Saying the award cannot be fairly divided is not the same as saying an award isn’t merited.

Fourth, to claim reparations would fuel the victim mentality is cheap rhetoric that overlooks how favoritism is widespread in American society. We don’t think twice before extending a helping hand to people in our social networks. The impact of such special treatment on the psyche of its beneficiaries isn’t different just because the beneficiary is black.

Finally, the notion that reparations already have been paid to African-Americans is insulting to the large majority of African-Americans who rely on welfare programs no more than white Americans do, or not at all. They suffered from the legacy of slavery and still face discrimination today. They have not been paid.

No Reparations

Reparations are not the solution. Saying today’s white Americans owe a specific monetary debt to today’s black Americans ignores the heterogeneity of class and race that existed during slavery and today. Who is entitled and who should pay are, in principle, unsolvable puzzles because of the passage of time and countless individual choices made by whites and blacks since the end of slavery.

Suing governments rather than individuals solves some parts of the problem but not others. Governments do not create wealth, they redistribute it. Asking today’s taxpayers to pay for government acts that occurred more than 150 years ago just puts the pea under a different shell. What is immoral for individuals to do is also immoral for governments to do.

The U.S. government has been trying to make amends for slavery, Jim Crow, and institutional discrimination for 40 years, since passage of civil rights legislation and the Great Society programs. Horowitz is right to say the trillions in taxpayer dollars spent trying to help the disadvantaged--black as well as white--climb the ladder of social and economic success is exculpatory.

Demand for an Apology

The first point made was that most knowledgeable advocates of reparations do not believe legal action, even against governments, will be successful. The goal is to get white Americans to admit reparations for slavery were owed in 1865, and perhaps again in 1965 for Jim Crow laws in the South and other forms of institutional discrimination in the North.

I believe it is skepticism similar to my own that leads many whites to view demands for an apology for slavery as merely a tactic used by black advocates who really seek a taxpayer-financed settlement of racial grievances. Apologizing amounts to little more than appeasement, we believe, and it would legitimize more militant demands for cash reparations.

Sure, some blacks use it as a platform from which to blame whites for their problems, and some whites find in it new evidence that blacks seek entitlement rather than equality and opportunity. But with effective public education and less-heated rhetoric from both sides, most people would understand the real goal is a better understanding of history and a new step toward improving race relations.

Financial reparations for slavery is neither good law nor good public policy, and a formal apology for slavery will not satisfy the most vocal advocates of reparations. Nor would everything done by governments or corporations out of guilt or shame help advance race relations.

Weird News

Every Wednesday, selected feature stories proving that truth is stranger than fiction....

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Cultural Diversity

Brand-new Japanese parents receiving a gift are then customarily obligated to give a lesser one in return, and the Yoshimiya rice shop in Fukuoka recently created the ideal such return: small bags of rice of the exact weight of the newborn, printed with its face and name, so that original gift-givers (relatives, friends) can experience cuddling "the baby." Then, of course, according to Yoshimiya's owner, they can break open the bag and eat the rice, though he admitted some people have a problem with that. [Reuters, 1-8-07]

"We sleep with the snakes (meaning cobras), we eat with the snakes, we live with the snakes (but) we are not scared," said a 14-year-old girl in a village near Calcutta, India, to a Wall Street Journal reporter in November. Said a village leader, "Whenever I lie down in my bed, a cobra will just slide on top of me, without hurting me." In fact, more than 3,000 cobras live in one hamlet, mostly in peace, with few bite victims (though a cobra bite is often fatal because villagers initially trust the gods and spirit doctors to treat them). Cobras are so revered in the village that cobra bites are usually described as attacks by vipers or by "nonresident" cobras, based on a belief that local cobras are incapable of evil. [Wall Street Journal, 11-26-07]

There is usually a well-stocked Red Cross tent when the January "corralejas" (amateur bullfights) take place in towns in the Colombian countryside, reported The New York Times in January. "This year was calm, no deaths yet," said a newscaster in Sincelejo. Hundreds of wannabe matadors jump into makeshift rings, some sponsored by local merchants but others merely inebriated or sober and foolish, some gaudily dressed, some in bunches (with one group even picnicking). Wrote the Times, "A stream of men arrived" in the Red Cross tent, "intestines peeking out of a belly, bone protruding from a fractured shin, blood spurting from a gash in the buttocks." Said a local, "This is about the ecstasy of escaping death." [New York Times, 1-24-08]

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Latest Religious Messages

Lord Balaji was a locally popular Hindu god in Hyderabad, India, until a few years ago when a priest noticed that more of his worshippers were complaining that valuable U.S. professional "H-1B" visas were harder to get. Overnight, Balaji was transformed from a purveyor of general prosperity to the "visa god," specializing in lucky H-1Bs, and the temple now draws 100,000 visitors a week. Said one, to a Wall Street Journal reporter in December, "I've never heard of anyone who's gone to the temple whose visa (application) got rejected" (even though typical advice from priest C.S. Gopala Krishna is simply to walk around the temple "11 times"). [Wall Street Journal, 12-31-07]

Questionable Judgments

In December, even after the widely reported tiger attack on a visitor at the San Francisco Zoo, the Houston Zoo was still allowing its visitors to play "tug of war" with its own lions and tigers. A 20-pound slab of meat, attached to a long rope, is tossed into the enclosure, and visitors are encouraged to toy with the cats by yanking on it as the animal lunges for it. Said a Houston zookeeper, the game keeps the animals from getting bored. Besides, a zoo official said, "(The lion or tiger) kind of lets us know when he wants to play, and we go along with that." [KVUE-TV (Austin), 1-9-08]

Two counselors in the Denver school system proposed in December that the school board give high school girls who get pregnant at least four weeks of maternity leave, without academic penalty, so they can bond with their newborns. The counselors said the policy would encourage teen mothers to stay in school. [Denver Post, 1-7-08]

Meanwhile, the Department of Education of the Australian Capital Territory in Canberra granted permission for a 16-year-old student at Stromlo High School to take smoking breaks, based on a doctor's finding that she is so "clinically addicted" to nicotine that her work suffers without it. [Sunday Telegraph (Sydney), 11-4-07]

A teacher at Yamata Elementary School in Yokohama, Japan, was disciplined in January after a finding that she improperly punished her class because a few students would not come to order. Officials said she lined up all students and walked down the row, slapping each one in the face. [Mainichi Daily News, 1-12-08]

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Family Values

Geraldine Magda, 44, was arrested in Austin, Minn., in January, following a nursing-home visit to hold the hand of her dying sister in her final hours. Magda was charged with stealing the wedding ring from her sister's finger during the hand-holding. [Star Tribune (Minneapolis), 1-4-08]

A Chicago man traveled to Sheboygan, Wis., in December to finally meet the 18-year-old woman who was his biological daughter, but during the same visit, he was arrested and charged with sexually assaulting her while she was sleeping. [WTMJ Radio (Milwaukee)-AP, 12-8-07]

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The Weirdo-American Community

In December, street performer John Domingue said the Huntington Beach, Calif., police have finally stopped hassling him for soliciting tips at the city's famous Pier Plaza when he demonstrates his skill at hammering nails into his nose without serious injury. (Some bleeding results, which is why police said they stopped him in the first place.) The American Civil Liberties Union said it is watching the case, citing Domingues' constitutional right to perform his nose-nailing, sword-swallowing and fire-eating acts for donations. [Orange County Weekly, 12-13-07]

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Least Competent Criminals

More Questionable Judgments: David Holland, 46, gave a DNA sample last year to police in San Jose, Calif., to help resolve murder charges against his brother, but was then arrested for an until-then-unsolved 2001 rape when his DNA sample matched that left behind by the rapist. [San Francisco Chronicle, 11-20-07]

Edward Debrow of San Antonio, Texas, who was sentenced to 27 years in prison for a 1992 murder conviction, appealed that sentence as too harsh. After a Texas appeals court granted his challenge and ordered a re-sentencing in October, a judge gave him 40 years. [KSAT-TV (San Antonio), 10-24-07]

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Recurring Themes

Awesome Capacities: Jason Panchalk, 36, was admitted to the Pima County (Arizona) jail in December, facing a charge of trafficking in stolen property, but he arrived prepared. According to a jailer, Panchalk was carrying "some syringes, matches, lighter, heroin, marijuana, and an assortment of pills," all inside his rectum. [KVOA-TV (Tucson), 1-9-08]

And in October, court officials in Cork, Ireland, who were suspicious of a defendant's demeanor, had him medically examined. According to a report in the Irish Independent, doctors found a mobile phone, SIM card and charger, all wrapped in foil and coated with lubricant, inside his rectum. [Irish Independent, 10-20-07]

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Least Justifiable Homicides

David Thomson, 49, was convicted in Edinburgh, Scotland, of smothering his mom to death after she had taunted him for his inept suicide attempt several weeks before (October). [BBC News, 10-23-07]

In Sydney, Australia, a man was charged with beating a neighbor to death because the neighbor was watering his lawn in violation of the city's water restrictions (October). [Fox News-AP, 11-1-07]

The boss of a factory in North Korea was executed by firing squad before 150,000 people in a South Pyongan province stadium after he was convicted of the crime of making out-of-country telephone calls (November). [Daily Mail (London), 11-26-07]

Hot Stories for Wed., Feb. 27, 2008

• Earthquake hits much of England
  It's the biggest earthquake in the UK for nearly 25 years. --BBC News
• Archeologists Find 5,500 Year Old Plaza in Peru
  It could be one of oldest places built in Americas.
  --Reuters
• Dean Radin Q & A
  The parapsychology researcher discusses ESP, spirituality, and consciousness. --SFGate.com
• Curry Spice May Thwart Heart Failure
  Tumeric found to aid in heart disease. --WedMD
• Forget global warming: Welcome to New Ice Age
  Snow cover over North America and much of Siberia, Mongolia and China is greater than at any time since 1966. --National Post

Satellite Sleuth Closes in on Noah's Ark Mystery

From Space.com

High on Mt. Ararat in eastern Turkey, there is a baffling mountainside "anomaly," a feature that one researcher claims may be something of biblical proportions.

Images taken by aircraft, intelligence-gathering satellites and commercial remote-sensing spacecraft are fueling an intensive study of the intriguing oddity. But whether the anomaly is some geological quirk of nature, playful shadows, a human-made structure of some sort, or simply nothing at all-that remains to be seen.

Whatever it is, the anomaly of interest rests at 15,300 feet (4,663 meters) on the northwest corner of Mt. Ararat, and is nearly submerged in glacial ice. It would be easy to call it merely a strange rock formation.

But at least one man wonders if it could be the remains of Noah's Ark-a vessel said to have been built to save people and selected animals from the Great Flood, the 40 days and 40 nights of deluge as detailed in the Book of Genesis.

The Genesis blueprint of the Ark detailed the structure as 6:1 length to width ratio (300 cubits by 50 cubits). The anomaly, as viewed by satellite, is close to that 6:1 proportion.

Newfound optimism

Identifying the Ararat anomaly has been a 13-year-long quest of Porcher Taylor, an associate professor in paralegal studies at the University of Richmond's School of Continuing Studies in Virginia.

Taylor has been a national security analyst for more than 30 years, also serving as a senior associate for five years at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C.

"I've got new found optimism ... as far as my continuing push to have the intelligence community declassify some of the more definitive-type imagery," Taylor told SPACE.com/LiveScience. He points to a "new and significant development," a high-resolution image taken by DigitalGlobe's impressive QuickBird satellite and shown here publicly for the first time [alternate version with no annotation].

"I'm calling this my satellite archeology project," Taylor said. It's an effort that has now included use of QuickBird, GeoEye's Ikonos spacecraft, Canada's Radarsat 1, as well as declassified aerial and satellite images taken by the various U.S. intelligence agencies.

Making the mountain transparent

Taylor said his goal is straightforward: Combining this imagery to make the Ararat anomaly transparent to the public, as well as to the discerning, dispassionate eyes of scientists, imagery analysts, and other experts.

"I had no preconceived notions or agendas when I began this in 1993 as to what I was looking for," Taylor said.

As for the saga of Noah's Ark, he is quick to note that there are those who say it is fable while some take it as truth.

Nevertheless, the anomaly may not be a ridge line of ice, snow and possibly rock, but an artificial ridge line, Taylor said. "I maintain that if it is the remains of something manmade and potentially nautical, then it's potentially something of biblical proportions."

While chiding the intelligence communities to release more of their closely guarded satellite imagery, Taylor said that soon-to-fly commercial remote sensing spacecraft are sure to help his archeological undertaking.

"We've got three new birds that are going up. I'm using all my clout, rapport and lobbying to, hopefully, have them at least fly calibration runs over Mt. Ararat," Taylor said. Those images would make the mountain even more transparent, he said.

Will it float?

Meanwhile, Taylor has an ever-expanding network of experts to help tease out the truth about the anomaly.

For example, satellite imagery analyst Rod Franz of SunTek Media Group/RiteImage, Inc., located in Henderson, Nevada, has taken a look at imagery provided by Taylor of the Ararat anomaly and carried out additional analysis of the area. As director of training for the firm, Franz sharpened his skills by serving nearly 25 years as a military intelligence imagery analyst.

For the anomaly assessment, the same software tools used for studying government and commercial remote sensing data were employed, Franz told SPACE.com/LiveScience. Ground distances and scales of the anomaly were determined. That software also has the ability to adjust brightness, haze, sharpness, contrast and other factors of the area of interest, he said.

"Along with many other image manipulation functions ... I also used the pseudo-color function trying to determine if I could detect anything under the ice and snow," Franz said.

The face of the anomaly measured 1,015 feet (309 meters) across, Franz said. "I also found the shape of the anomaly appears to fit on a circle. I am not sure what this means, if anything, but I find it curious."

Given that length, Taylor pointed out, the anomaly dwarfs the Titanic and Bismarck in size, and equals the size of the largest modern aircraft carrier. That analysis would seem to call into question whether the anomaly is a wooden ship and raises a key question: If a boat were truly that huge, would it float?

There are also experts in remote sensing who offer a skeptical view.

"Image interpretation is an art," said Farouk El-Baz, Director of the Boston University Center for Remote Sensing.

"One has to be familiar with Sun lighting effects on the shape of observed features," El-Baz said. "Very slight changes in slope modify shadow shapes that affect the interpretations. Up to this time, all the images I have seen can be interpreted as natural landforms. The feature that has been interpreted as the 'Ararat Anomaly' is to me a ledge of rock in partial shadow, with varied thickness of snow and ice cover.

Visual truth serum

Thanks to more satellite imagery in the offing, as well as other studies underway, Taylor said his remote archeological research is on the upswing.

There is an ultimate end-game. That is, on-the-spot ground truth ... and Taylor hopes his research findings will catalyze a top-notch expedition to the area. "It is whatever it is," he said.

But for now, satellite remote sensing to carry out archeological "digs" from space will fill in for an in-the-field expedition.

Just a few weeks ago, for example, NASA scientists utilizing space- and aircraft-based remote sensing hardware and techniques uncovered Maya ruins hidden in the rainforests of Central America for more than 1,000 years.

"For explorers, imagery from GeoEye's Ikonos satellite married with Global Positioning System (GPS) satellite data has become as indispensable as water and freeze dried food for any expedition. One does not want to leave home without it," said Mark Brender, GeoEye Vice President for communications and marketing, headquartered in Dulles, Virginia.

For researchers, imagery from space like those provided by GeoEye provides "the ultimate high shot" and a contextual view you could never get from observations on the ground or even from a plane, Brender told SPACE.com/LiveScience. "It's visual truth serum."

Notable links:

• Zoom in on Mt. Ararat
• 2002: Satellite Search Underway For Noah's Ark
• 2001: Satellites Search for Noah's Ark
• Claimed Discovery of Atlantis Called 'Completely Bogus'
• End of the World? Not Likely, Scientists Say
• The Truth Behind the Shroud of Turin

Designer Decimals

Calculate 100/89. You get the decimal expansion 1.1235955056 . . .

Look closely, and you'll see that this fraction generates the first five Fibonacci numbers (1, 1, 2, 3, and 5) before blurring into other digits. Recall that, starting with 1 and 1, each successive Fibonacci number is the sum of the two previous Fibonacci numbers: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, and so on.

Calculate 10000/9899. This time, you get 1.0102030508132134559046368 . . .

This fraction generates the first 10 Fibonacci numbers (using two digits per number). Going further, the fraction 1000000/998999 generates the first 15 Fibonacci numbers (using three digits per number).

Note that, in successive fractions, two 0s are appended to the numerator and a 9 to the beginning and end of the denominator.

Will the next fraction, 100000000/99989999, generate the first 20 Fibonacci numbers? Does the pattern continue forever? The answer appears to be yes.

James Smoak discovered this curious phenomenon, and he and Thomas J. Osler went on to prove that this class of fractions always produces decimal expansions containing terms of the Fibonacci sequence. They described it as "a magic trick from Fibonacci."

A little later, Marjorie Bicknell-Johnson found a formula, or "generalized mathematical magician," that identifies fractions whose decimal representations include successive values belonging to a variety of other sequences. She called them designer decimals.

In the November College Mathematics Journal, Smoak (with O-Yeat Chan) continues his adventures in the realm of designer decimals.

Consider, for example, the fraction 10000/9801. It has the decimal expansion 1.0203040506 . . . , suggesting the existence of a new class of fractions with curious properties.

Smoak and Chan ask: Do all the integers from 1 to 99 occur in the sequence? Given that the decimal expansion must repeat, what is the length and nature of the repeating part?

The key, Smoak and Chan say, is to note that 9801 = 99². So 10000/9801 = (100/99)² = (1.0101010101 . . . )².

Then, it's possible to show that the repeating part is 0203 . . . 97990001.

In general, fractions of the form [10ⁿ/(10ⁿ – 1)]^k yield the sequence of integers in their decimal expansions.

It's amazing what can lie hidden in simple fractions!

Quark Park

Crammed into a narrow wedge of land in downtown Princeton, N.J., an unusual but ephemeral park presents a quirky celebration of art, science, mathematics, architecture, and landscape design.

A neon sign marks the entrance to Quark Park in Princeton, N.J. Marc Pelletier's 120-cell sculpture is visible below the sign.

Named Quark Park, this Alice-in-Wonderlandish garden offers an enchanting visual and aural experience. Granite pillars ring with resonant tones. Crystal shafts sprout from sand, reaching for the sky. Glass bubbles float in a sparkling sea. Mirrored double helices flash fragments of light as they twirl in the breeze. An intricate, stainless-steel cage glints geometrically in brilliant sunlight.

When struck by a metal rod, each of these granite pillars emits a tone. This "augmented lithophone" was created by sculptor Jonathan Shor, in collaboration with Princeton music and computer science professor Perry Cook. Signal processing equipment enhances the vibrations to simulate a cave-like setting.

The park was conceived, designed, and organized by architect Kevin Wilkes and colleagues Peter Soderman and Alan Goodheart. It temporarily fills a sliver of land that is to be redeveloped into housing, so the park is open to the public only through November.

The "Light Emerging" sculpture is meant to represent the nacsent industry of solid-state lighting. The bottom of each plastic rod has a thin layer of phosphor that converts incoming blue light into a particular color. At night, these colors are visible on the canopy that hangs over the rods.

The mathematical highlight is a stainless-steel sculpture by Marc Pelletier, honoring Princeton mathematician John H. Conway. The sculpture represents a three-dimensional shadow, or projection, of a famous, four-dimensional figure sometimes called the 120-cell, where each cell (or three-dimensional face) is a dodecahedron.

Glinting sunlight highlights pentagons that form the basis of Marc Pelletier's 120-cell sculpture.

A regular dodecahedron has 30 edges and 12 faces, each of which is a regular pentagon. Its four-dimensional analog—a polydodecahedron—contains 120 dodecahedra. Pelletier's sculpture embodies one possible, particularly symmetric projection of this four-dimensional object in three dimensions.

This view of the 120-cell reveals striking symmetries.

The sculpture, in which steel rods define the edges of the object's dodecahedra, features an undistorted dodecahedron at its center. This dodecahedron is surrounded by 12 others, which are only slightly distorted by foreshortening. Proceeding outward, the next layer has 20 dodecahedra, then 12 more that are considerably flattened by foreshortening. The final layer consists of 30 dodecahedra that are seen edge-on and so appear flat, delineating the sculpture's outer surface.

In a different setting and viewed from a different angle, the 120-cell shows off other geometric patterns.

The original version of the 120-cell sculpture created by Pelletier is located at the Fields Institute in Toronto, where it honors geometer H.S.M. Coxeter, who died in 2003.

This model, crafted by George Hart, represents an alternative three-dimensional projection of the 120-cell—one that shows all of the object's 120 cells.

Another sculpture at Quark Park that has a mathematical element is the result of a collaboration between Princeton physicist Paul Steinhardt and sculptor Christoph Spath. Called "Forbidden Geometry," it is based on three-dimensional models of four different shapes that can be combined as building blocks to form so-called quasicrystals.

This sculpted model of a quasicrystal is made up of 6 building blocks (zonohedra), three fashioned from limestone and three from glass. The projections on the blocks represent the rules that define how blocks can be combined to form larger structures.

One of my favorite installations at Quark Park appears to have, at first glance, little to do with mathematics. Called "Motion in the Ocean," it consists of 1,200 hand-blown glass bubbles hanging from an overhead frame. The assemblage looks like a school of glistening fish, drifting underwater in a seaweedy nook.

Glass artist Bob Kuster collaborated with mechanical engineer Naomi Ehrich Leonard to create a school of glass fish.

Mechanical engineer Naomi Ehrich Leonard, who inspired the artwork, studies how animals use feedback to move as a cohesive whole, with the idea of applying similar principles to coordinate the movements of robots. The result may be a school of robotic underwater gliders. And there's certainly math in modeling the synchrony and interconnectedness required to get this to work.

Entering a glassy sea.

It's a shame that this assemblage and all the other wonderful elements of Quark Park will soon disperse and disappear.

An Attack on Fermat

The first female research mathematician had a program to solve Fermat's Last Theorem, and it was almost lost to history.

First of two parts

Around 1630, Pierre de Fermat scribbled his famous note in the margin of a book stating what is now known as "Fermat's Last Theorem." "I have discovered a truly remarkable proof which this margin is too small to contain," he added. His proof has never been found and was almost certainly wrong, but Fermat's conjecture bedeviled mathematicians for centuries to come.

Mathematicians soon realized that the problem was far harder than it first appeared. Number theorists labored endlessly to nibble off small parts of it, but in the early 1800s, one mathematician finally developed a bold strategy that had the potential to solve the whole problem at once. But the entire approach was very nearly lost to history, because until recently, all the notes and manuscripts were moldering unread in a French library.

Sophie Germain was the first person to develop a realistic plan to prove Fermat's Last Theorem.

The mathematician who developed the approach was respected by luminaries like Carl Friedrich Gauss, Adrien-Marie Legendre, and Joseph-Louis Lagrange, but was marginal in the mathematical community, with no formal training or university position. That's because the mathematician was a woman—indeed, the first woman to do significant research in mathematics.

Sophie Germain has been known for her work in the theory of elasticity and the curvature of surfaces, but until now, her only known work in number theory was a single result that Legendre attributed to her in a footnote.

"What he credited to her in this footnote is in some sense really a misrepresentation of what she did," says Reinhard Laubenbacher of Virginia Polytechnic and State University in Blacksburg. He and David Pengelley of New Mexico State University in Las Cruces searched through her notes in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. Of the over 2,000 pages in the archive, hundreds and hundreds concerned number theory.

Some pages contained mere doodles that degenerated into chicken scratches, but many were filled with remarkable results. Included was a 20-page manuscript Germain had written so meticulously that not a single word was scratched out. "I personally believe," Pengelley says, "that she intended to submit it to the French academy for the prize for Fermat's Last Theorem."

Fermat's Last Theorem states that there are no nonzero whole numbers x, y, and z such that xⁿ + yⁿ = zⁿ for any n greater than 2. (For n = 2, there are lots of solutions, for example, 3² + 4² = 5².) No complete solution to the problem was found until 1994, when Andrew Wiles of Princeton University cracked it using very sophisticated modern techniques from algebraic geometry.

During Germain's time, the main approach to the problem was to tackle it for particular exponents n. And Germain herself used the proof she has been known for, called Sophie Germain's Theorem, to show that the theorem is true for any n less than 100, if none of x, y, or z is divisible by n.

This result alone was remarkable, given the challenges Germain faced. As a woman, Germain couldn't enroll in the universities in France. So she took on the identity of a male student who had recently left the school, Antoine-August LeBlanc, reading lecture notes and sending in her homework assignments.

Auguste Eugene Leray painted this portrait of Germain at 14. She had started studying mathematics a year earlier, despite her family's efforts to discourage her. A friend noted in her obituary that she studied "by getting up at night in a room so cold that the ink often froze in its well, working enveloped with covers by the light of a lamp even when, in order to force her to rest, her parents had put out the fire and removed her clothes and a candle from the room."

But somehow, her instructor, the great mathematician Lagrange, discovered her secret. According to a commentator at the time, Lagrange "went to her to express his astonishment in the most flattering of terms," and the commentator goes on to say that "the appearance of this young 'geomètre' made quite a stir." Nevertheless, the barriers against Germain's inclusion in the mathematical community didn't come tumbling down. She still couldn't enroll in the university, and her education was haphazard. And even after she had produced many impressive results, she had difficulty getting access to the French Academy of Sciences.

Indeed, Pengelley and Laubenbacher believe that she must have worked in far greater isolation than previously thought, judging from her notes. Legendre had been thought to have been a mentor for Germain. They both lived in Paris and both worked on Fermat's Last Theorem. But her notes show that they independently proved many of the same theorems and seemed to know little of one another's methods.

"Legendre's techniques were much more ad hoc," Pengelley says. "Germain would develop a theoretical approach or algorithm, not a computational one. She focused on methods of general applicability. She was more the theoretical mathematician." Pengelley and Laubenbacher presented their findings at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in San Diego in January.

Furthermore, Pengelley and Laubenbacher were astonished to find that Germain had something no other mathematician had at that time: a plausible, realistic plan for cracking Fermat's Last Theorem in its entirety, not just one number at a time, and not just if none of x, y, or z is divisible by n. This newly discovered grand plan used a completely different approach than what mathematicians have known from Sophie Germain's Theorem all this time.

"She was out to prove it all in one fell swoop," Laubenbacher says. "She was going to use this new math Gauss had developed. She read Gauss's book and said, 'That's the ticket to proving Fermat!' That was very bold. Nobody thought like that. Her role in 19th-century number theory was revolutionary."

Look for part II next week.