Welcome to ...

The place where the world comes together in honesty and mirth.
Windmills Tilted, Scared Cows Butchered, Lies Skewered on the Lance of Reality ... or something to that effect.


Sunday, March 1, 2009

Hooked On Facts

Today's six facts are:

40% of all the indigestion remedies sold in the world are bought by Americans.

25% of your bones are located in your feet.

The typical speck of dust you see floating in the air is half way in size between the Earth and a subatomic particle.

The Saguaro cactus, that grows in the southwest United States does not grow branches until it is 75 years old.

The average human body contains .1mg of uranium, .2mg of gold, and 7mg of arsenic!

Senegalese women spend an average of 17.5 hours a week just collecting water.

Bonus fact: The United Kingdom eats more cans of Baked Beans than the rest of the world combined!
(That explains a lot.)

Bonus - Bonus fact: Poll result: Nachos is the food most craved by mothers-to-be

Science News

In today's Science News we find:

Lost world of extremophiles hides beneath Great Lakes

Revealed: Scientific evidence for the 2001 anthrax attacks

King of the swingers has no use for mirrors

How to survive the coming century

Spit bacteria could be as distinct as fingerprints

Future TV screens seen in coffee stains

And I Quote

Nine-tenths of wisdom is being wise in time.

~ President Theodore Roosevelt

$#$%##!

Yeah, like that'll fricking work ...

Los Angeles County tries for cuss-free week

Pay no attention to that eerie silence in the nation's most populous county this week; it will simply be the sound of 10 million people not cussing.

On Tuesday, the board is scheduled to issue a proclamation by Supervisor Michael Antonovich making the first week in March No Cussing Week.

That would mean no blue language from the Mojave desert, where it gets hot as $&# in the summer, to the Pacific Ocean, where on a winter's day it can get colder and nastier than %$#!

The prudes are at it again!

A Real Groaner

What is green and purple and wants revenge?

The Grapes of Wrath

Flooding in Mecklenburg, Union, Cabarrus

And to think, we're to get up to a half a foot of snow on top of this, tonight?!

*****

Heavy rain has triggered flash flooding Sunday evening in the Charlotte metro region, authorities report.

A flood warning is in effect until 10 p.m. for Mecklenburg and Cabarrus counties. A flood warning expired at 6:15 p.m. in Union County.

The rain, totaling more than 3 inches in some places since Saturday morning, fell steadily and heavily much of Sunday afternoon.

Charlotte fire Capt. Rob Brisley said emergency crews were called to deal with three trees that fell, possibly because their roots were loosened by the downpours. One of those trees fell on the main branch of the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg, on North Tryon Street.

"Fortunately, there were no injuries," Brisley said.

Ken Martin, deputy superintendent of streets for the City of Charlotte, said crews took time away from preparing for tonight's snowfall to deal with flooding problems.

"We had people clearing places where the water had backed up," Martin said. "We actually started doing this Friday, but we had a number of calls today."

UNION COUNTY

In Union County, flooding was reported at a number of places. Local authorities said most streams were receding at 6 p.m., but portions of some roads remained under water.

Some of the areas affected by the flooding:

-- N.C. 218 at U.S. 601, near Fairview.

-- Newtown Road, in southwest Union County.

-- Antioch Church Road, near Weddington.

-- Lawyers Road at Indian Trail-Fairview Road, near Hemby Bridge.

-- Benton Street at North Charlotte Avenue, in Monroe.

CABARRUS

Widespread flooding also was reported in Cabarrus County, especially near Harrisburg. The Rocky River rose to 15 feet at 5:30 p.m. near Harrisburg. The National Weather Service office in Greer, S.C., said at that level, flooding probably was taking place along Back Creek.

Cabarrus County spokeswoman Aimee Hawkins said flooding was being reported at these locations:

-- Bowman Barrier Road

-- N.C. 200

-- Stough Road

-- Bethel School Road, near Midland Road

-- Stallings Road

-- Pharr Mill Road, on the bridge between Sequoia Hills and Rocky River Road

Hawkins said authorities also were watching these areas for flooding: Robinson Church Road near Rocky River Road; Adams Creek near Oldenburg Estates; and Hickory Ridge Road near Rocky River Road.

MECKLENBURG

High water was reported at 5:30 p.m. in these areas:

-- Mallard Creek, along Pavilion Boulevard.

-- Sugar Creek, near Arrowood Road.

*****

And to top it all off there are claps of thunder rumbling overhead at the moment. Persistent drizzling rain - heavy rain - sleet -snow - thunder (don't know about ligthning, yet) - frigid temperatures, all in all a very appropriate start to the month of March, don't you think?!

They finally get it

Something I have been saying all along ...

Low-carb? Low-fat? Study finds calories count more

Low-fat, low-carb or high-protein? The kind of diet doesn't matter, scientists say. All that really counts is cutting calories and sticking with it, according to a federal study that followed people for two years. However, participants had trouble staying with a single approach that long and the weight loss was modest for most.

As the world grapples with rising obesity, millions have turned to popular diets like Atkins, Zone and Ornish that tout the benefits of one nutrient over another.

Some previous studies have found that low carbohydrate diets like Atkins work better than a traditional low-fat diet. But the new research found that the key to losing weight boiled down to a basic rule - calories in, calories out.

"The hidden secret is it doesn't matter if you focus on low-fat or low-carb," said Dr. Elizabeth Nabel, director of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, which funded the research.

Limiting the calories you consume and burning off more calories with exercise is key, she said.

The study, which appears in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine, was led by Harvard School of Public Health and Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Louisiana.

Researchers randomly assigned 811 overweight adults to one of four diets, each of which contained different levels of fat, protein and carbohydrates.

Though the diets were twists on commercial plans, the study did not directly compare popular diets. The four diets contained healthy fats, were high in whole grains, fruits and vegetables and were low in cholesterol.

Nearly two-thirds of the participants were women. Each dieter was encouraged to slash 750 calories a day from their diet, exercise 90 minutes a week, keep an online food diary and meet regularly with diet counselors to chart their progress.

There was no winner among the different diets; reduction in weight and waist size were similar in all groups.

People lost 13 pounds on average at six months, but all groups saw their weight creep back up after a year. At two years, the average weight loss was about 9 pounds while waistlines shrank an average of 2 inches. Only 15 percent of dieters achieved a weight-loss reduction of 10 percent or more of their starting weight.

Dieters who got regular counseling saw better results. Those who attended most meetings shed more pounds than those who did not - 22 pounds compared with the average 9 pound loss.

Lead researcher Dr. Frank Sacks of Harvard said a restricted calorie diet gives people greater food choices, making the diet less monotonous.

"They just need to focus on how much they're eating," he said.

Sacks said the trick is finding a healthy diet that is tasty and that people will stick with over time.

Before Debbie Mayer, 52, enrolled in the study, she was a "stress eater" who would snack all day and had no sense of portion control. Mayer used to run marathons in her 30s, but health problems prevented her from doing much exercise in recent years.

Mayer tinkered with different diets - Weight Watchers, Atkins, South Beach - with little success.

"I've been battling my weight all my life. I just needed more structure," said Mayer, of Brockton, Mass., who works with the elderly.

Mayer was assigned to a low-fat, high-protein diet with 1,400 calories a day. She started measuring her food and went back to the gym. The 5-foot Mayer started at 179 pounds and dropped 50 pounds to 129 pounds by the end of the study. She now weighs 132 and wants to shed a few more pounds.

Another study volunteer, Rudy Termini, a 69-year-old retiree from Cambridge, Mass., credits keeping a food diary for his 22-pound success. Termini said before participating in the study he would wolf down 2,500 calories a day. But sticking to an 1,800-calorie high-fat, average protein diet meant no longer eating an entire T-bone steak for dinner. Instead, he now eats only a 4-ounce steak.

"I was just oblivious to how many calories I was having," said the 5-foot-11-inch Termini, who dropped from 195 to 173 pounds. "I really used to just eat everything and anything in sight."

Dr. David Katz of the Yale Prevention Research Center and author of several weight control books, said the results should not be viewed as an endorsement of fad diets that promote one nutrient over another.

The study compared high quality, heart healthy diets and "not the gimmicky popular versions," said Katz, who had no role in the study. Some popular low-carb diets tend to be low in fiber and have a relatively high intake of saturated fat, he said.

Other experts were bothered that the dieters couldn't keep the weight off even with close monitoring and a support system.

"Even these highly motivated, intelligent participants who were coached by expert professionals could not achieve the weight losses needed to reverse the obesity epidemic," Martijn Katan of Amsterdam's Free University wrote in an accompanying editorial.

*****

It takes 10 calories per pound per day for the body to maintain its functions at any given size. To reduce size one must take in fewer calories (but don't be stupid about it as some of these 'diets' have you do), the body will get the balance it needs from energy stored as fat until it realizes it no longer needs the balance and resets itself to the lower calorie intake when the body mass reduces to equal the calorie intake.

The 10 calorie per pound rule is inflexible, whether you are 180 pounds or 380 pounds it takes 1800 and 3800 calories respectively to maintain the functioning of the body. A calorie intact of 1200 for a 180 pound person is dangerous as is a 2400 calorie intake, just as a 3200 calorie intake for a 380 pound person is dangerous as is a 4400 calorie intake.

Most Americans take in around 2000 calories in a single meal ... you do the math, here.

Reduce your calorie intake by 200 to 250 calories a day and you will slowly (I repeat, slowly, - and safely) reduce weight by reducing body mass containing adipose tissue [fat]. And this is without exercise.

If you exercise while doing this you will reduce weight and gain weight ... and you better be exercising while doing this ... the weight loss will be from the loss of adipose tissue and the weight gain will be from the replacement of the adipose tissue with muscle tissue - which weighs twice as much as adipose tissue - this is a GOOD thing. You will continue to lose body mass and re-proportion the remaining body mass in more appropriate areas with muscle build up.

So do not feel that weighing more after 'dieting' and exercise is a waste ... so what if you weighed 200 pounds to start and you weigh 210 pounds after you're done if your waist was 48 inches before and 42 inches after - you lost the fat and replaced it with muscle.

Sweet Child O'Mine


Guns 'n Roses

Repugicans being repugicans

John Amato posted this piece, this morning over at Crooks and Liars:

Rick Santelli's rant was a preplanned right-wing scam to torpedo Obama's economic agenda

Just another day and just another conservative scandal. I thought the organization around Rick Santelli's rant was a little too smooth, a little too perfectly orchestrated for something not to be very, very wrong about it. That's why I've been so vocal about it and that's why it infuriated me so much, but I had no idea how deep this deception went.

The right wing moneychangers tried once again to control the message and lie to the American people to push their agenda that only hurts America. The right wing elite hated FDR because he turned on his own class of people and put the average American worker ahead of them. They were shocked that he would care about the state of our nation over the vested interests in a very small few. I did write that Rick's behavior was indicative of most talking heads that appear on the Wall Street shows because they are slaves to the very wealthy. These same people are terrified that Barack Obama may indeed reach America in the same way that FDR reached into the hearts of a depressed and hopeless American population that was beat down by the the depression back in 1929.

Rick Santelli is a traitor to this country and he should be fired immediately along with all those that participated in this fraud. The rest should be exposed and made to answer for this charade.
What a great job of reporting by Mark Ames and Yasha Levine of Playboy:

Last week, CNBC correspondent Rick Santelli rocketed from being a little-known second-string correspondent to a populist hero of the disenfranchised, a 21st-century Samuel Adams, the leader and symbol of the downtrodden American masses suffering under the onslaught of 21st century socialism and big government. Santelli’s “rant” last-week calling for a “Chicago Tea Party” to protest President Obama’s plans to help distressed American homeowners rapidly spread across the blogosphere and shot right up into White House spokesman Robert Gibbs’ craw, whose smackdown during a press conference was later characterized by Santelli as “a threat” from the White House. A nationwide “tea party” grassroots Internet protest movement has sprung up seemingly spontaneously, all inspired by Santelli, with rallies planned today in cities from coast to coast to protest against Obama’s economic policies.

What we discovered is that Santelli’s “rant” was not at all spontaneous as his alleged fans claim, but rather it was a carefully-planned trigger for the anti-Obama campaign. In PR terms, his February 19th call for a “Chicago Tea Party” was the launch event of a carefully organized and sophisticated PR campaign, one in which Santelli served as a frontman, using the CNBC airwaves for publicity, for the some of the craziest and sleaziest rightwing oligarch clans this country has ever produced. Namely, the Koch family, the multibilllionaire owners of the largest private corporation in America, and funders of scores of rightwing thinktanks and advocacy groups, from the Cato Institute and Reason Magazine to FreedomWorks. The scion of the Koch family, Fred Koch, was a co-founder of the notorious extremist-rightwing John Birch Society.

As you read this, Big Business is pouring tens of millions of dollars into their media machines in order to destroy just about every economic campaign promise Obama has made, as reported recently in the Wall Street Journal. At stake isn’t the little guy’s fight against big government, as Santelli and his bot-supporters claim, but rather the “upper 2 percent”’s war to protect their wealth from the Obama Adminstration’s economic plans. When this Santelli “grassroots” campaign is peeled open, what’s revealed is a glimpse of what is ahead and what is bound to be a hallmark of his presidency.

Please read the entire article: Backstabber: Is Rick Santelli High On Koch?

All I can say is thankfully we have blogs to help expose this massive corrosion that has seeped into the bowels of our nation and uses our national media on all levels to mainline their corruption. Shame on them all.

As whenwego at DKos writes:

It appears that this is the brain child of the shadowy Sam Adams project:

The Sam Adams Alliance, a nonprofit conservative organization, has started an ambitious project this year to encourage right-leaning activists and bloggers to get online and focus on local and state issues.

And the coordination is now expanding to business interests that are opposed to Obama's programs:

Industries from health care to agribusiness to mining that stand to lose under President Barack Obama's policy agenda are ramping up lobbying campaigns to derail or modify his plans.

The day after Mr. Obama formally laid out his policy goals in his first address to Congress, the former chief executive of HCA Inc. unveiled a $20 million campaign to pressure Democrats to enact health-care legislation based on free-market principles.

And don't bother to ask who is behind the Sam Adams Alliance, because all that is scrubbed:

But it’s the Alliance’s scrubbing of their link to Koch that is most telling. A cached page, erased on February 16, just three days before Santelli’s rant, shows that the Alliance also wanted to cover up its ties to the Koch family.

*****
What is truly amazing is this same piece is being written, over and over again by many different sources - all saying the same thing. The world recognizes a load of crap when they smell it and Santelli's 'rant' was just that - a load of crap.

The "S" Word

It's started ... that 4 to 6 inches of snow we are supposed to get over night has begun.
It is coming down more as sleet at the moment with the fluffier flakes mixed in.
This on top of the rain for the last two days and with temperatures in the teens tonight, tomorrow morning is going to be hell on traffic for the morning commute.

Welcome to snow in the South, or as we call it around here ... 'slush', and frozen slush is as hard an icepack as you can get.

Unusual Celbrations and Holidays

BTW, today happens to be:

Beer Day

and

Pig Day

as well.

This Month

This month is:

Humorists Are Artists Month

an it is also

International Mirth Month.

Do I detect a theme here?

Giving it up the wahzoo


Is this a brand new TV? It is if you got it at Circuit City's Finial Liquidation Sale!


Stories are pouring in from outraged shoppers who thought they could get a great deal on equipment from Circuit City as part of its fire sale liquidation. The problem: Circuit City won't let you open sealed boxes to inspect merchandise before you take it home -- and all sales are final. No returns. No exchanges. That's not so great if the gear is hopelessly broken.

One Minnesota family spent $1,500 on a 50-inch plasma TV and found the glass shattered once they got it home. The store refused to take back the TV and instead referred the issue to Circuit City headquarters, where no one answered the phone. The family is checking with Panasonic, the manufacturer, to see if it's covered under warranty.

A similar problem happened to a Boston customer, who paid $1,100 for what turned out to be a totally busted Samsung TV. She got a refund from her credit card company, but only after a local TV station made inquiries on her behalf. Be warned: Consumerist says that getting credit card companies to help you out may be difficult in cases like this where a bankruptcy is involved. (As I understand the specifics of the Circuit City case, normally your credit card company will just "charge back" the merchant in question, but in this case the merchant is going out of business and has federal bankruptcy protection during the process.)

It's not just big ticket items that can be dead on arrival. Consider this $7.50 "bargain" video game purchased from a Circuit City store, which appears to have been chewed up by a robot.

*****

Just more examples of a greedy corporation giving up the arse to their customers.

Hit a nerve

Over at Skippy the Bush Kangaroo this was posted by Skippy yesterday and the wing-nuts came slithering out from under their rocks in the fetid swamps to cry 'foul' ... The truth hurts them so!

it's my tea party and i'll lie if i want to

via the dispassionate liberal (on twitter of all places) we find out that the sudden populist "tea party" movement that has literally dozens of followers across the united states, is neither sudden nor populist. from exiled online:

within hours of santelli’s rant, a website called chicagoteaparty.com sprang to life. essentially inactive until that day, it now featured a youtube video of santelli’s “tea party” rant and billed itself as the official home of the chicago tea party. the domain was registered in august, 2008 by zack christenson, a dweeby twitter republican and producer for a popular chicago rightwing radio host milt rosenberg—a familiar name to obama campaign people. last august, rosenberg, who looks like martin short’s irving cohen character, caused an outcry when he interviewed stanley kurtz, the conservative writer who first “exposed” a personal link between obama and former weather undergound leader bill ayers. as a result of rosenberg’s radio interview, the ayers story was given a major push through the republican media echo chamber, culminating in sarah palin’s accusation that obama was “palling around with terrorists.” that rosenberg’s producer owns the “chicagoteaparty.com” site is already weird—but what’s even stranger is that he first bought the domain last august, right around the time of rosenburg’s launch of the “obama is a terrorist” campaign. it’s as if they held this “chicago tea party” campaign in reserve, like a sleeper-site. which is exactly what it was.

chicagoteaparty.com was just one part of a larger network of republican sleeper-cell-blogs set up over the course of the past few months, all of them tied to a shady rightwing advocacy group coincidentally named the “sam adams alliance,” whose backers have until now been kept hidden from public. cached google records that we discovered show that the sam adams alliance took pains to scrub its deep links to the koch family money as well as the fake-grassroots “tea party” protests going on today. all of these roads ultimately lead back to a more notorious rightwing advocacy group, freedomworks, a powerful pr organization headed by former republican house majority leader dick armey and funded by koch money.
the piece goes on to discuss eric odom, who was the "brains" (?) behind last summer's dont'go.com faux populist movement, and his badly-hidden involvement in this tea party phenom.

but more telling is when we follow the money:

but it’s the alliance’s scrubbing of their link to koch that is most telling. a cached page, erased on february 16, just three days before santelli’s rant, shows that the alliance also wanted to cover up its ties to the koch family. the missing link was an announcement that students interested in applying for internships to the sam adams alliance could also apply through the “charles g. koch summer fellow program” through the institute for humane studies, a koch-funded rightwing institute designed to scout and nurture future leaders of corporate libertarian ideology. the top two board directors at the sam adams alliance include two figures with deep ties to koch-funded programs: eric o’keefe, who previously served in koch’s institute for humane studies and the club for growth; and joseph lehman, a former communications vp at koch’s cato institute.

all of these are ultimately linked up to koch’s freedom works mega-beast. freedomworks.org has drawn fire in the past for using fake grassroots internet campaigns, called “astroturfing,” to push for pet koch projects such as privatizing social security. a new york times investigation in 2005 revealed that a “regular single mom” paraded by bush’s white house to advocate for privatizing social security was in fact freedomworks’ iowa state director. the woman, sandra jacques, also fronted another iowa fake-grassroots group called “for our grandchildren,” even though privatizing social security was really “for koch and wall street fat cats.”
now maybe those dozens of protesters will have to have a little crow w/their tea.

addendum: also discussed on the big picture, to whom we link purely for the memeorandum traffic.

update: the wingnuts attack!
*****

I feel your pain, having been the 'victim' of numerous wing-nut tirades I can empathize. They are annoying aren't they?!

Pi Day ice-cube trays

Just perfect for the geek on your gift list ...

Pi Day's coming up March 14th and here's an ice tray to impress your friends and colleagues at your Pi Day party.

Pi Symbol Ice Cube Trays

Didn't know Pi had a day? You're not alone ...

Business Week in error

National recognition for Cornelius

BusinessWeek magazine names town one of the country's top 10 ‘Best Affordable Suburbs.'

The secret is out, Mayor Jeff Tarte says: Cornelius is one great place to live.

That's not just an official's braggadocio. BusinessWeek magazine has named Cornelius one of the country's 10 “Best Affordable Suburbs.”

The magazine's editors weighed such factors as livability, which includes short commutes, low pollution and amount of green space. They looked at crime rates, job growth, median household income ($87,016 in Cornelius), median home price ($206,000 here), education levels and quality of schools.

They weighted “affordability” most heavily and penalized places with high divorce rates, lack of racial diversity, few children and bad weather.

Selected towns have populations of 5,000 to 60,000 (Cornelius has 17,290), median family incomes of $51,000 to $120,000 and lower-than-average crime rates, and they are within 25 miles of one of the nation's most populous cities.

Cornelius was ranked seventh in the nation and No. 1 in North Carolina.

“The fast-growing bedroom community, 30 miles north of Charlotte, has some beautiful homes on Lake Norman, North Carolina's largest lake,” the magazine wrote. “About 31 percent of residents are married with children. The average commute is 31 minutes.”

*****

Sorry to burst your bubble, but Business Week got it wrong. Any long time resident of the area will tell you different - the town of Huntersville is far better than Cornelius and always has been.

It should be pointed out that most of the "beautiful homes on Lake Norman, North Carolina's largest lake" the magazine speaks of were in the town of Huntersville when the magazine people saw them -and they still are ... a lot of outsiders and people new to the area make the same mistake - not knowing where the town boundaries are.

Most of the houses in Cornelius are a of the type known as 'shotgun' houses - the type of cheap houses thrown up for mill workers in every mill town everywhere.

Oh, and that commute time of 31 minutes is a joke. Try over an hour to go the 15 miles to Charlotte (it is not 30 miles as the magazine says).

Archaeology News

For the want of Rosetta

When archaeologists on a dig in southern Portugal last year flipped over a heavy chunk of slate and saw writing not used for more than 2,500 years, they were elated.

The enigmatic pattern of inscribed symbols curled symmetrically around the upper part of the rough-edged, yellowish stone tablet and coiled into the middle in a decorative style typical of an extinct Iberian language called Southwest Script.

"We didn't break into applause, but almost," says Amilcar Guerra, a University of Lisbon lecturer overseeing the excavation. "It's an extraordinary thing."

For more than two centuries, scientists have tried to decipher Southwest Script, believed to be the peninsula's oldest written tongue and, along with Etruscan from modern-day Italy, one of Europe's first. The stone tablet features 86 characters and provides the longest-running text of the Iron Age language ever found.

About 90 slate tablets bearing the ancient inscriptions have been recovered, most of them incomplete. Almost all were scattered across southern Portugal, though a handful turned up in the neighboring Spanish region of Andalucia.

Some of the letters look like squiggles. Others are like crossed sticks. One resembles the number four and another recalls a bow-tie. They were carefully scored into the slate. The text is always a running script, with unseparated words which usually read from right to left.

The first attempts to interpret this writing date from the 18th century. It aroused the curiosity of a bishop whose diocese encompassed this region where the earth keeps coughing up new fragments.

Almodovar, a rural town of some 3,500 people amid a gentle landscape of meadows punctuated by whitewashed towns, sits at the heart of the Southwest Script region. It created a museum two years ago where 20 of the engraved tablets are on show.

Though the evidence is gradually building as new tablets are found, researchers are handicapped because they are peering deep into a period of history about which they know little, says professor Pierre Swiggers, a Southwest Script specialist at the University of Leuven, Belgium. Scientists have few original documents and hardly any parallel texts from the same time and place in readable languages.

"We hardly know anything about (the people's) daily habits or religious beliefs," he says.

Southwest Script is one of just a handful of ancient languages about which little is known, according to Swiggers. The obscurity has provided fertile ground for competing theories about who wrote these words.

It is generally agreed the texts date from between 2,500 and 2,800 years ago. Most experts have concluded they were authored by a people called Tartessians, a tribe of Mediterranean traders who mined for metal in these parts—one of Europe's largest copper mines is nearby—but disappeared after a few centuries. Some scientists have proposed that the composers were other pre-Roman tribes, such as the Conii or Cynetes, or maybe even Celts who roamed this far south.

Another translation difficulty is that the writing is not standardized. It seems certain that it was adapted from the Phoenician and Greek alphabets because it copied some of their written conventions. However, it also tweaked some of those rules and invented new ones.

Experts have identified characters that represent 15 syllables, seven consonants and five vowels. But eight characters, including a kind of vertical three-pronged fork, have confounded attempts at comprehension.

There's also the problem of figuring out what messages the slate tablets are intended to convey. Even when they can read portions of text, scientists don't really understand what it is saying—like a child mouthing the words of a Shakespeare play.

"We have a lot of doubts," says Guerra, who has written scholarly articles about Southwest Script. "We can read characters and see the phonetics in action ... but when we try to understand what they actually mean we have a lot of problems."

There are clues, however.

The symmetrical, twisting text gives the impression of a decorative flourish. Some stones also feature crudely rendered figures, such as a warrior carrying what appear to be spears. The lower part of the rectangular stones is left blank as if intended to be stuck in the ground.

That has led experts to a supposition: The tablets were gravestones for elite members of local Iron Age society. Repeated sequences of words perhaps mean "Here lies..." or "Son of...," Guerra explains. Since most people probably couldn't read, the ornamental elements lent distinction.

These are educated guesses, says Guerra, as he surveys the hilltop dig by a small river where the big stone was found last year. His team here has excavated through centuries of occupation: Islamic (Almodovar is a corruption of the Arabic word al-mudura, meaning encirclement or enclosure), Roman and pre-Roman. Nowadays, it is within view of a wind farm's turbines.

Last year's find has helped, but it wasn't the breakthrough scientists had hoped for, Guerra says. If all the Southwest Script found so far were transcribed onto paper, it would still barely fill a single sheet. Without an equivalent of the Rosetta stone which helped unlock the secrets of hieroglyphic writing, efforts to reconstruct the ancient language are doomed to slow progress.

"We have to be patient—and hopeful," Guerra says.

Going Down


JJ Cale and Leon Russell

As the fortune cookie crumbles

Today's fortune cookie reads:

The pleasure of what we enjoy is lost by wanting more.

Suspect in New Jersey bank robberies lives next to police station

Police in Barrington, New Jersey didn't have to travel far to find a man accused of robbing three banks in southern New Jersey.

That's because 61-year-old Lawrence Dove Sr. lives next door to a police station.

Dove was arrested Wednesday near his Barrington home and charged with robbing banks in Haddon Township, Haddonfield and Lawnside this month.

Authorities have not said how much Dove, who is unemployed, may have taken from the banks.

Dove is being held on $225,000 bail. He could face up to 30 years in prison if convicted.

Not a veteran ... a loon

Man says veteran status should let him steal candy

Authorities in Fort Pierce, Florida arrested a man who claimed he was justified in stealing candy at a truck stop because he had served in the military. Police said an officer confronted a 31-year-old man at the truck stop early Monday morning. The officer reported finding several packages of candy and nuts, two black T-shirts and a 20 oz. bottle of beer in his pockets.

He said he had paid for all the items, but a clerk denied ringing up any purchases for him.

A report stated that while in the patrol vehicle, the man screamed out the window that he had served in the military over in Iraq and could steal all the M&M'S he wanted.

His veteran status could not be immediately verified.

The man was charged with retail theft and was being held on $5,000 bail.

*****

This man is no veteran - even if he was in the military - he is a lunatic. And a petty theif to boot.

Missing nine years

Caution: Heartwarming Story

A German shepherd named Astro who has been missing from his family for more than 9 years is finally home.

The Geary family was shocked when they recently received a call from an animal control officer who said that Astro had been found.

The dog went missing from the Geary family's Port St. Lucie, Fla. home shortly after the family adopted him. Since then, they have moved three times and ended up in Louisville, Ky.

On Jan. 29, 2009, an animal control officer in Tennessee picked up Astro after receiving a report about a dog running loose. Officers tracked down the family through a microchip implanted in the canine.

Dennis Geary says he wasn't sure if Astro would remember him. But when they were reunited, the dog sat down and began licking him.

Frying Pan to the rescue

Woman, 70, whacks intruder in head with sauce pan

The 70-year-old wife of an Ohio judge said teens who tried to rob her made her so angry that she whacked one in the head with a sauce pan. Ellen Basinski said she was on the phone with her husband Tuesday when four boys pushed their way into her home in Elyria, west of Cleveland.

Lorain County Judge David Basinski overheard the scuffle and raced home, while his wife grabbed her favorite pan to defend herself against the intruders rifling through her purse and cabinets.

One of the teens told police he threw a bottle of whiskey at Basinski to distract her so another boy could flee. They ran from the house but were later caught and charged with aggravated burglary.

The judge said his wife is upset that police took the pan as evidence.

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Lagasse replaces pan woman used to fend off attack

Chef Emeril Lagasse says he felt so bad when he heard a woman lost one of his trademark pans while warding off home intruders that he's replacing the item. Lagasse is sending 70-year-old Ellen Basinski a whole new set of his signature cookware.

She used her favorite pan to fight the intruders at her home west of Cleveland on Tuesday. Police then took it from her to be used as evidence.

Basinski was on the phone with her husband when the teens pushed their way into her home.

Her husband, Lorain County Judge David Basinski, overheard the scuffle, called 911 and raced home. Meanwhile, his wife says she grabbed the 5-quart saucepan and hit one teen, who was going through her purse.

The four were arrested. The judge said his wife was upset that her pan was seized by police.

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