masterwordsmith-unplugged

OK I am keeping quiet.

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The air vehicle named em age seventeen, on the seventeeth of the seventh month, at seventeen seventeen in the morning...in the air two zero one four ...the sum of which is sixteen and the sum of those digits one and six would be seven....

and is it coincidence?

HER SMILE is infamous – and her identity – a mystery.

Now scientists are recovering skeletal remains from a Renaissance-era tomb that may bring them one step closer to finding out if the subject of the Mona Lisa is indeed Lisa Gherardini, the wife of silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo.

Historians say Gherardini spent her last years at the Saint Orsola convent, where the hunt for her bones began last year.

Lead researcher Silvano Vinceti will compare the remains to those of three women found at the convent.

''A long research on family tombs showed that by tradition families were all buried together, father, mother, children. Therefore, the burial of Lisa Gherardini in the Sant'Orsola convent is an anomaly and we cannot discard the hypothesis that she was transferred (in the Iucundi family tomb, with the rest of her family) in the mid 1600s (when there were major restoration works in the convent.) So, before checking possible DNA matches between the mortal remains found in the convent and the living descendants, we will compare them with the remains that we found here," says Vinceti.

Once a DNA match is made, Vinceti says an image of Gherardini's face can be generated from the Saint Orsola skull and then compared with the painting.

CLICK HERE for the video.

Having visited Stonehenge in 1997, I can vouch that there is a certain aura and magnetism about that place.

Here's a very old pic of me at that remarkable site. I still remember using two copper wires to detect the 'energy' lay line...

Imagine the horror I felt when I visited this website.

CLICK HERE to see what I mean.

So was it restoration, construction or what?

I am not endorsing the information there. Neither am I condemning it. I am just sharing...

Personally, I believe Stonehenge is real but built by .... :-)

However, I would really love to hear your views. Do leave a comment!

Thanks!

CLICK HERE to read about ten cases of famous unsolved mysteries.

For those who have served on a jury...this one is something to think about. Just when you think you have heard everything. Do you like to read a good murder mystery? Not even Law and Order would attempt to capture this mess. This is an unbelievable twist of fate!!!!

At the 1994 annual awards dinner given for Forensic Science, (AAFS) President, Dr. Don Harper Mills astounded his audience with the legal complications of a bizarre death. Here is the story:

On March 23,1994, the medical examiner viewed the body of Ronald Opus and concluded that he died from a shotgun wound to the head. Mr. Opus had jumped from the top of a ten-story building intending to commit suicide.

He left a note to the effect indicating his despondency. As he fell past the ninth floor, his life was interrupted by a shotgun blast passing through a window, which killed him instantly.

Neither the shooter nor the deceased was aware that a safety net had been installed just below the eighth floor level to protect some building workers and that Ronald Opus would not have been able to complete his suicide the way he had planned.

The room on the ninth floor, where the shotgun blast emanated, was occupied by an elderly man and his wife. They were arguing vigorously and he was threatening her with a shotgun! The man was so upset that when he pulled the trigger, he completely missed his wife, and the pellets went through the window, striking Mr. Opus.

When one intends to kill subject 'A' but kills subject 'B' in the attempt, one is guilty of the murder of subject 'B.'

When confronted with the murder charge, the old man and his wife were both adamant, and both said that they thought the shotgun was not loaded. The old man said it was a long-standing habit to threaten his wife with the unloaded shotgun. He had no intention to murder her. Therefore the killing of Mr. Opus appeared to be an accident; that is, assuming the gun had been accidentally loaded.

The continuing investigation turned up a witness who saw the old couple's son loading the shotgun about six weeks prior to the fatal accident. It transpired that the old lady had cut off her son's financial support and the son, knowing the propensity of his father to use the shotgun threateningly, loaded the gun with the expectation that his father would shoot his mother.

Since the loader of the gun was aware of this, he was guilty of the murder even though he didn't actually pull the trigger. The case now becomes one of murder on the part of the son for the death of Ronald Opus.

Now comes the exquisite twist....

Further investigation revealed that the son was, in fact, Ronald Opus.

He had become increasingly despondent over the failure of his attempt to engineer his mother's murder. This led him to jump off the ten-story building on March 23rd, only to be killed by a shotgun blast passing through the ninth story window.

The son, Ronald Opus, had actually murdered himself. So the medical examiner closed the case as a suicide.

A true story from Associated Press which Mr Krishnan shared with me via email. Thanks, Mr. Krishnan!

The immigration reform measure the Senate began debating yesterday would create a national biometric database of virtually every adult in the U.S., in what privacy groups fear could be the first step to a ubiquitous national identification system.

Buried in the more than 800 pages of the bipartisan legislation (.pdf)  is language mandating the creation of the innocuously-named “photo tool,” a massive federal database administered by the Department of Homeland Security and containing names, ages, Social Security numbers and photographs of everyone in the country with a driver’s license or other state-issued photo ID.

Employers would be obliged to look up every new hire in the database to verify that they match their photo.

This piece of the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act is aimed at curbing employment of undocumented immigrants. But privacy advocates fear the inevitable mission creep, ending with the proof of self being required at polling places, to rent a house, buy a gun, open a bank account, acquire credit, board a plane or even attend a sporting event or log on the internet. Think of it as a government version of Foursquare, with Big Brother cataloging every check-in.

“It starts to change the relationship between the citizen and state, you do have to get permission to do things,” said Chris Calabrese, a congressional lobbyist with the American Civil Liberties Union. “More fundamentally, it could be the start of keeping a record of all things.”

For now, the legislation allows the database to be used solely for employment purposes. But historically such limitations don’t last. The Social Security card, for example, was created to track your government retirement benefits. Now you need it to purchase health insurance.




CLICK HERE for more.

A Washington woman got quite a surprise when Facebook’s “People You May Know” feature reportedly recommended a potential contact. The two women certainly had something in common: a husband.

The woman’s identity has remained anonymous, so we will call her Wife 1. She was perusing the popular social networking site when she says she saw the other woman, who we will call Wife 2, suggested by Facebook as a person she may know.

She clicked on the woman’s profile and saw photos of the woman standing next to a wedding cake — along with Wife’s 1 estranged husband. That’s when Wife 1 did what any logical person would do: She called her mother-in-law.

READ MORE HERE.

Now the 18-month-long episode, which came at the height of the Cultural Revolution, has been unearthed by a new exhibition.

The mango mania began in the autumn of 1968 when Pakistan's Foreign minister arrived in Beijing and presented Chairman Mao with a case of the fruit.

In turn, the Great Helmsman decided to use the exotic fruit, then utterly unknown in most of China, to make a political statement.

He sent the case, containing roughly 40 mangoes, to a group of workers occupying the campus of Tsinghua university.

Astonished by the miraculous gift, they decided to send one mango to each of Beijing's most important factories.

READ MORE HERE.

Using both male and female ancestry a 12 year old girl has linked every US president but one to the former King of England as they are all of the same bloodline and one common ancestor.

It’s the first family tree of it’s kind according to the report, linking the presidents to the signer of the Magna Carta, John “Lackland” Plantagenet the King of England in the year 1166.

CLICK HERE to listen to her fascinating discovery!

This evening, I came across an article about how some marine biologists have discovered that sea otters of Monterey Bay indulge in rape, murder and necrophilia.

According to Discovery News:

Sea otters – cute, furry, adorable, clams-wouldn’t-melt-in-their-mouths sea otters – have been observed forcibly copulating with, and in the process killing, juvenile harbor seals off California.

In an edition of the journal Aquatic Mammals, Heather Harris of the California Department of Fish and Game and colleagues document nineteen occurrences of this behavior in Monterey Bay between 2000 and 2002, leading to the deaths of at least 15 seals.


Harris and her colleagues describe one incident in vivid detail:

A weaned harbor seal pup was resting onshore when an untagged male sea otter approached it, grasped it with its teeth and forepaws, bit it on the nose, and flipped it over. The harbor seal moved toward the water with the sea otter following closely. Once in the water, the sea otter gripped the harbor seal’s head with its forepaws and repeatedly bit it on the nose, causing a deep laceration. The sea otter and pup rolled violently in the water for approximately 15 min, while the pup struggled to free itself from the sea otter’s grasp. Finally, the sea otter positioned itself dorsal to the pup’s smaller body while grasping it by the head and holding it underwater in a position typical of mating sea otters. As the sea otter thrust his pelvis, his penis was extruded and intromission was observed. At 105 min into the encounter, the sea otter released the pup, now dead, and began grooming.

On some occasions, they further note, otters would guard and copulate with the seals long after their victims had died -– as much as seven days afterward, in fact.

Bizarre as this behavior may seem, Harris and her co-authors point out that it is not dissimilar to standard sea otter mating protocol, in which males will often approach the female from behind, grip her around the chest with his forepaws, and grasp her nose or the side of her face with his teeth. Although the female frequently resists, generally the two eventually spin in the water, the male behind the female, until mating is complete.


READ THE REST OF THE ARTICLE HERE.

What's behind names? Events? Celebrity deaths? Ever thought there was more than meets the eye?

Two billion have been bought.

What?

Why?

Where?

Read about it HERE.

500 comments so far. Read those comments if you have time. TQ!

Millions of birds have descended on a small Kentucky city this winter, fouling the landscape, scaring pets and raising the risk for disease in a real-life version of Alfred Hitchcock's horror film, The Birds.

The blackbirds and European starlings blacken the sky of Hopkinsville, Kentucky, before roosting at dusk, turn the landscape white with bird poop, and the disease they carry can kill a dog and sicken humans.

"I have seen them come in, and there are enough that if the sun is just right, they'll cloud your vision of the sun," said Hopkinsville-Christian County historian William Turner. "I estimate there are millions of them."

David Chiles, president of the Little River Audubon Society, said the fact that migratory flocks are roosting in the city rather than flying further south is tied to climate warming.

READ MORE HERE.

 A meteor that exploded over Russia's Ural mountains and sent fireballs blazing to earth has set off a rush to find fragments of the space rock which hunters hope could fetch thousands of dollars a piece.

Friday's blast and ensuing shockwave shattered windows, injured almost 1,200 people and caused about $33 million worth of damage, said local authorities.

It also started a "meteorite rush" around the industrial city of Chelyabinsk, 1,500 km (950 miles) east of Moscow, where groups of people have started combing through the snow and ice.

One amateur space enthusiast estimated chunks could be worth anything up to 66,000 roubles ($2,200) per gram - more than 40 times the current cost of gold.

"The price is hard to say yet ... The fewer meteorites that are recovered, the higher their price," said Dmitry Kachkalin, a member of the Russian Society of Amateur Meteorite Lovers. Meteorites are parts of a meteor that have fallen to earth.

Scientists at the Urals Federal University were the first to announce a significant find - 53 small, stony, black objects around Lake Chebarkul, near Chelyabinsk, which tests confirmed were small meteorites.

The fragments were only 0.5 to 1 cm (0.2 to 0.4 inches) across but the scientists said larger pieces may have crashed into the lake, where a crater in the ice about eight meters (26 feet) wide opened up after Friday's explosion.

"We just completed tests and confirm that the pieces of matter found by our experts around Lake Chebarkul are really meteorites," said Viktor Grokhovsky, a scientist with the Urals Federal University and the Russian Academy of Sciences.

"These are classified as ordinary chondrites, or stony meteorites, with an iron content of about 10 percent," he told RIA news agency.

He did not say whether the fragments had told his team anything about the origins of the meteor, which the U.S. space agency NASA estimated was 55 feet across before entering Earth's atmosphere and weighed about 10,000 tons.

The main fireball streaked across the sky at a speed of about 30 km (19 miles) per second, according to Russian space agency Roscosmos, before crashing into the snowy wastes.

TREASURE HUNTERS

More than 20,000 people took part in search and clean-up operations at the weekend in and around Chelyabinsk, which is in the heart of a region packed with industrial military plants.

MORE HERE.

CLICK HERE to read this very interesting article. 

Whether it is true or not, I do not know but am sharing for the sake of interest.

Apparently, another potential meteor crash may have happened in Cuba today. Related? From the foreign language news site: "In a report released this morning by Rodas, town in the province of Cienfuegos, witnesses described a very bright light that has come to have large size, comparable to that of a bus, before exploding in the sky."


Meanwhile in Russia...

"it was really unexpectedly. it shined like 10 suns. all my windows in my house was broken. people was in panic in first hours. it's not funny, really. But people is calm now." - Facebook comment on CNN article

Russians living near the Ural Mountains were in for a terrifying surprise yesterday evening (Friday morning, locally) on Valentines Day, February 14th, when a meteor zoomed through the sky and exploded overhead, causing windows to break and hundreds to be injured (last count,  725). So far, 270 buildings are damaged. Fortunately the vast majority of injuries appear to be non life-threatening.

CLICK HERE for more.

Here I am head spinning but still reading. Came across this excellent article.

CLICK HERE to read all about some forgotten assassinations.

Most interesting and with pics too!

Happy reading!

Actually, I did not even know the Pope had resigned until a former student vibered me to ask me my views. As some of you know, I have not been updating my blog as religiously as I used to in the past due to my injuries.

Now that I am slowly on the mend, I am trying to catch up with the news and came across this article that may shed some light on why he resigned.
 
CLICK HERE to read all about it.

The blog title says it all. Check it out. For obvious reasons, silence is the way.