You Know You Have Been In Finland Too Long, When . .

1. You rummage through your plastic bag collection to see which ones you should keep to take to the store and which can be sacrificed to garbage. (plastic bags - formerly free, now costing - supplied by Finnish shopkeepers are vastly superior to those in other countries. Something to do with the weight of bottles they need to be able to withstand?)
   
2. When a stranger on the street smiles at you: a. you assume he is drunk; b. he is insane; c. he's an American.
   
3. You don't think twice about putting the wet dishes away in the cupboard to dry. (Finnish houses and apartments have excellent draining cupboards over the sink-unit, where the plates can dry off.)
   
4. A friend asks about your holiday plans and you answer: "Oh, I'm going to Europe!" meaning any other Western European country outside Scandinavia.
   
5. You see a student taking a front row seat and wonder "Who does he think he is!!??" (Is it only Finnish university students that do not volunteer information for discussion at lectures?
   
6. Silence is fun.
   
7. Your coffee consumption exceeds 6 cups a day and coffee is too weak if there is less than two spoonfuls per person.
   
8. You associate pea soup with Thursday. (Several hundred years ago, when Finland was still a part of Sweden and taxes were levied for the King, money was scarce and peas were used for payment. However, since peas had hitherto mostly been used as pig food, something had to be done to raise their status. The population was thus encouraged to eat pea soup. Soldiers got a weekly portion of pea soup, sometimes strengthened with pig's trotters and the fatty parts of pork. After the meal the bones were used for magic. Thursday became pea soup day, since the Catholic religion proscribed meat on Fridays and people needed a solid dinner the day before. Over the centuries pea soup has acquired at least nine different names in Finnish; moreover it has also become a traditional Shrovetide food, before Lent. Today pea soup is also inseparably connected with the Finnish oven-baked dessert pancake.)
   
9. Hugging is reserved for sexual foreplay.
   
10. You refuse to wear a hat, even in -30°C weather.
    
11. You hear loud-talking passengers on the train. You immediately assume: a. they are drunk; b. they are Swedish-speaking; c. they are Americans; d. all of the above.
    
12. You enjoy salmiakki. ("chloride of ammonia" is found as a white encrustation around volcanoes. It is used in chemical analysis, in medicine, in dry batteries, as a soldering flux, and in textile printing. Salmiakki is the name given to a salty licorice candy containing this strange stuff, and is immensely popular among Finns, particularly when they are not in the country and therefore cannot get it. It even became a drinks fad almost as threatening to the nation as absinthe was to France, when mixed with vodka to make "salmiakkikossu". Along with hard rye crispbreads and other delicacies, it is a staple of web-sites advertising Finnish goods for the poor souls who are no longer resident here.)
    
13. You accept that 80°C in a sauna is chilly, but 20°C outside is freaking hot.
    
14. You know how to fix herring in 105 different ways.
    
15. You eat herring in 105 ways.
    
16. "No comment" becomes a conversation strategy.
    
17. You can't understand why people live anywhere but in Finland.
    

Too Sweet for New York

NEW YORK -- New York City has many odors, but when the city began to smell a little too good, New Yorkers became alarmed.

Residents from the southern tip of Manhattan to the Upper West Side nearly 10 miles north called a city hot line to report a strong odor Thursday night that most compared to maple syrup, The New York Times reported Friday.

There were so many calls that the city's Office of Emergency Management coordinated efforts with the Police and Fire Departments, the Coast Guard and the City Department of Environmental Protection to find the source of the mysterious smell.

Air tests haven't turned up anything harmful, but the source was still a mystery.

"We are continuing to sample the air throughout the affected area to make sure there's nothing hazardous," said Jarrod Bernstein, an emergency management spokesman. "What the actual cause of the smell is, we really don't know."

Although many compared the smell to maple syrup, others said it reminded them of vanilla coffee or freshly-baked cake. All seemed to agree that it was a welcome change from the usual city smells.

"It's like maple syrup. With Eggos (waffles). Or pancakes," Arturo Padilla told The Times as he walked in Lower Manhattan. "It's pleasant."

Copyright 2005 Associated Press.

Who Wants Exxon?

U.S. oil giant Exxon-Mobil has dismissed a proposed bid to buy it from a little known Chinese firm for $450 billion. Texas-based Exxon is the world's biggest publicly-traded oil company.

Last week Exxon posted a quarterly profit of $9.9bn, the largest in U.S. corporate history, on the back of record oil and gas prices.

King Win Laurel has filed papers with the Securities and Exchange Commission offering to buy the firm in a dollars and yuan deal worth $70 a share.

Exxon said it did not believe King was "financially capable" of such an offer.

King Win Laurel, which said it was incorporated in New Zealand on 21 October, said the offer was subject to financing and included incentives for shareholders if the price of oil kept on rising.

"We do not believe that King Win Laurel Limited is financially capable of making such a tender offer," Exxon spokesman Dave Gardner said in a statement.

The booming Chinese economy is in need of increasing oil supplies, and earlier this year its oil producer CNOOC withdrew an $18.5bn bid for U.S. firm Unocal, after American political opposition.

"It is not out of the realm of possibility that the Chinese government could fund a bid for Exxon, so we can't ignore it entirely, even though that's my initial inclination," said debt analyst Jon Cartwright of BOSC.

From BBC News, October 31, 2005.

Who Got Moons?

Two small moons have been discovered orbiting Pluto, bringing the planet's retinue of known satellites to three and leaving scientists to wonder how it could be.

The newfound moons orbit about 27,000 miles (44,000 kilometers) from Pluto, more than twice as far as Charon, Pluto's other satellite. They are 5,000 times dimmer than Charon.

While scientists had predicted there might be more moons, the newfound setup is surprising nonetheless, in part because Pluto is smaller than our own Moon.

"It's almost like a mini solar system," said Hal Weaver of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. "How can something about 70% the size of Earth's Moon have all these satellites? How can that happen? We're going to have to explain that."

The two new moons are between 30 and 100 miles (45 to 160 kilometers) in diameter, Weaver said. There is not enough data to pin their size down exactly, however. Pluto is 1,430 miles wide and Charon's diameter is about 730 miles.

The moons were found using the Hubble Space Telescope. The presumed moons are 23rd magnitude, far to dim to be seen with a typical backyard telescope but "relatively easy to see with Hubble," Weaver said.

From an article appearing in Space.com

Football Coach Sought in Alabama

A football coach in Montgomery, Ala., is being sought by police who say he is accused of shooting the boyfriend of his star player's mother because the man pulled the boy from the team.

Police said Timothy Campbell, 32, was shot Tuesday outside the mother's home.

Montgomery police spokesman Lt. Huey Thornton said Campbell had forced the 12-year-old boy to quit the team as punishment for some trouble he had gotten into. Campbell told police the coach confronted him with a gun.

"An argument ensued between the two about this, and it escalated into the suspect actually shooting the victim once in the back," Thornton said. "The coach wanted him to play."

. . .
by William M. Welch, USA TODAY, October 19, 2005.

Just Checking

MOSCOW -- A member of the Kyrgyz parliament was among four people taken hostage and killed by inmates during an inspection of a prison camp near the capital, Bishkek, RIA Novosti news service reported, citing the Interior Ministry.

Tymychbek Akmatbayev, president of the parliamentary commission on law and order, was murdered Thursday when inmates began to riot during his visit to the camp at the village of Moldavanovka, Nosti said.

DAILY NEWS, October 23, 2005.

They Did It With Mirrors

Did Archimedes really produce a death ray 2,200 years ago? According to Greek and Roman historians, he set Roman warships afire with a polished mirror that focused the sun's rays from afar during the siege of Syracuse. Last year the Discovery Channel program "MythBusters" declared the story a myth after failing to reproduce the feat.

But David Wallace, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, posed it as an offbeat class project in product development. Setting up 127 cheap on-square-foot mirrors 100 feet from a wooden mock-up of the side of a ship, with just 10 minutes of clear sky the "ship" burst into flames.

"We're not trying to assess whether Archimedes really did it or not," Dr. Wallace said. Instead, his students have shown that "It's at least possible."

From an article appearing in The New York Times, October 18, 2005.

Libya death sentence for medics

SOFIA, Bulgaria -- In 1998, at a time when her country was mired in hyperinflation, Valya Chervenyashka left her rural Bulgarian village and went to work as a nurse in Benghazi, Libya, for $250 a month, to pay for her daughters' college education.

Today, Chervenyashka and four other Bulgarian nurses, as well as a Palestinian doctor, are under death sentence in a Libyan jail and facing a firing squad, accused of intentionally infecting more than 400 hospitalized Libyan children with the AIDS virus - in order, according to the initial indictment, to undermine Libyan state security.

They were also charged with working for Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service.

Although the motive of subversion has since been dropped, the death sentence stands.

The nurses' final appeal is scheduled to be heard by the Libyan Supreme Court on Nov. 15.

"Nurses from little towns in Bulgaria acting as agents of Mossad?" said Antoanetta Ouzounova, one of Chervenyashka's daughters, now 28. "It all sounds funny and absurd until you realize your mother could die for it."

Libyan officials have suggested that the Bulgarians pay $10 million in compensation for each of the 420 children allegedly infected with AIDS, according to Bulgarian and EU diplomats.

From an article appearing in the International Herald Tribune, October 14, 2005.

Intelligent Design

HARRISBURG, Pennsylvania, October 17 -- Michael J. Behe, a biochemistry professor at Lehigh University, has spent the last eight years traveling to colleges promoting intelligent design as a challenge to the theory of evolution. . .

He says the "best and most striking example of design" is the bacterial flagellum, "the outboard motor bacteria use to swim." His projected drawing depicts what he calls a "rotary motor" attached to a "drive shaft" that pushes a propeller. He says it's impossible to avoid concluding that the mechanism represents a "purposeful arrangement of parts".

He was called as the first expert witness for the defense in the Dover, Pennsylvania federal trial where 11 parents are suing the Dover school board for requiring students to hear a statement about intellent design in a high school biology class. When asked whether intelligent design is religion, or "based on any religious beliefs," Mr. Behe said . .

"No, it isn't. It is based entirely on observable physical evidence from nature."

Mr. Behe is the author of Darwin's Black Box, a book published in 1996 that spurred the intelligent design movement.

Adapted from an article appearing in The New York Times, October 18, 2005.

Second-Grader Brings Pot On School Trip

BRIDGEPORT, Conn. -- A Bridgeport second-grader who brought more than a dozen bags of marijuana to school will not face criminal charges -- but his uncle will.

Police said the 8-year-old found his 18-year-old uncle's stash, and brought it on a school field trip Friday to show friends.

A teacher found the boy stuffing bags of marijuana into his pockets during the trip to Yale's Peabody Museum of Natural History.

The school said the boy will not face any discipline because officials did not find any malice on his part.

His uncle, 18-year-old Albert Davidson of Stamford, was charged with possession of marijuana with intent to sell, possession of marijuana with intent to sell within 1,500 feet of a school and risk of injury to a minor. He was released after posting a $1,000 bond.

NBC-30, Connecticut News, October 18, 2005.

Centaurs Lived

Archeologists have discovered rock paintings depicting strange creatures and called them "teriantrops", hybrids of humans and animals. Researchers believe that ancient artists made the paintings from life.

Paul Takon from the Australian Museum in Sydney, and anthropologist Christopher Chippendale from the University of Cambridge, say that such hybrids, including centaurs, were likely living side-by-side with primitive man. In Australia and South Africa, the researchers discovered dozens of rock paintings showing animals with human heads and humans with animal heads that may be over 32,000 years old.

The study covered about 5,000 rock paintings of our ancestors. The researchers systematized the frequency and the types of depicted teriantrops and determined their ages. They arrived at a conclusion that animal men actually existed in the remote past. They believe that primitive man could hardly have drawn what he never saw.
 
Myths of ancient Greece and Rome tell us about animal men, frequently centaurs: creatures with having the head, arms, and trunk of a man and the body and legs of a horse.

The word centaur is a compound of KEN (kenw) meaning "I kill" and TAUROS meaning "bull", and it reveals astronomic knowledge of our ancestors. When the constellation of Sagittarius (Centaurus throwing a spear) appears in the night skies, we can no longer see Taurus, one of the Sun symbols.

The ancient legends say that centaurs came down from the Greek mountains where they failed to keep up friendly relations with the local population. Having a taste for wine, they easily flew into rages and conflicts with people.
 
Mythology expert Alexander Guryev says that animal men were the result of buggery, sexual activity between man and beast, quite typical of ancient epochs.

From Pravda (online), October 11, 2005.

B.U.S.T.E.D.

CORRY, PENNSYLVANIA -- A man charged with stealing beer was caught by the very cans he stole.

Frank Martin, the owner of Alibi Bar, knew someone had been stealing beer, so he took two six-packs and wrote "BUSTED" on the bottoms of the cans, one letter per can.

Mr. Martin suspected that it was an inside job because no one appeared to be breaking in.

Then, police called on a man who used to work at the bar, and checked his recycling bin. Sure enough, 10 of the marked cans were inside.

From an article in The Washington Times, October 17, 2005.

"Often Imitated, Never Invalidated"

JEFFERSON, TEXAS -- Next to a lifelike replica of a giant ape head, the believers milled around tables Saturday covered with casts of large footprints, books about nature's mysteries and T-shirts proclaiming: "Bigfoot: Often Imitated, Never Invalidated."

But the search for the legendary Sasquatch is no joke for many of the nearly 400 people who came here to discuss the latest sightings and tracking techniques at the Texas Bigfoot Conference.

Outlandish theories about the origin of Bigfoot abound, including that it might be an extraterrestrial. Many think that a towering, apelike creature descended from a prehistoric 9- to 10-foot-tall gorilla called a Gigantopithecus and that it now inhabits North American forests.

From The Washington Times, October 17, 2005.

The Galloping Ghost

"this man Red Grange of Illinois is three or four men rolled into one . . . Jack Dempsey, Babe Ruth, Al Jolson, Paavo Nurmi* and Man o'War."

So said columnist Damno Runyon after witnessing what is regarded as the greatest single-game accomplishment of any running back in football on October 18, 1924. That was the day Harold "Red" Grange sped into college football history as the Galloping Ghost.

Playing as a junior that day with the Fighting Illini of Illinois against Michigan he first zig-zagged 95 yards for a touchdown on the kickoff. Five minutes later he ran 67 yards for another. Later in the first quarter he bolted 56 and 44 yards for two more.

That's when the coach took him out, mercifully, with the score Grange 27, Michigan 0.

In the third period he ran 11 yards for his fifth TD, then he passed (in those days you played boths sides) for 20 yards.

His stats for the day: 212 yards rushing, 64 yards passing (6-for-6), and 126 on kickoff returns for a titanic total of 402 yards.

Taken from an article appearing in The Washington Times, October 17, 2005.

*Finnish long-distance track star of the 1920s.

New 'Botticelli Code' Unveiled

(ANSA) - Rome, October 14 - One of the most famous and most studied paintings of the Renaissance hides a carefully coded map of 15th-century Italian politics, it was claimed on Friday.

Sandro Botticelli's 'Primavera' (Spring), painted in 1478, has been pored over for decades and a wealth of interpretations have been produced explaining the enigmatic arrangement of the eight figures and the cupid.

The most common identifies the figures with eight months of the year, starting on the right with February and ending on the left with September. Each figure also has a mythological identity so that their positions relative to each other can be seen as telling a story with philosophical implications on life and beauty.

But Enrico Guidoni, a lecturer in art history at Rome's La Sapienza University, believes that although this may be true it is far from being the whole story.

Presenting his new book in Rome, he said it was crucial to remember who Botticelli was working for when he painted the picture. His employer was a cousin of Lorenzo de Medici, the powerful and art-loving ruler of Florence who has gone down in history as 'the Magnificent'.

The Primavera painting shows a secret strategy Lorenzo de Medici' had worked out to unite the major Italian city states in peaceful co-existence, Guidoni argued.

The nine figures represent important cities in 15th century Italy, he continued, listing what he said were linguistic links between the some of the characters portrayed and the cities they stood for.

The figure covered in flowers usually identified as Flora, the Roman goddess of flowers, is Florence; the cupid representing love, or 'Amor' in Italian, is Rome; the falling girl on the right, named as Ver (Latin for spring), is Venice. Guidoni said the three women who formed a small group on the right, apparently representing the three graces of mythology, were three key maritime powers: Pisa, Naples and Genoa.

The military-looking figure on the far left was Milan, source of weapons and arms at the time; the serene, motherly figure in the centre was Mantua; and the cold-looking one on the extreme right, bearing down on 'Venice', was Bolzano.

Guidoni's deductions and interpretations are explained in a recently published book, which outlines Lorenzo de Medici's efforts in the 1480s to begin forging his alliances.

© Copyright ANSA. All rights reserved 2005-10-14 19:34

Estonians break ground, vote online

TALLINN, Estonia - This tiny former Soviet republic nicknamed "e-Stonia" because of its tech-savvy population is breaking new ground in digital democracy.

This week, Estonia became the first country in the world to hold an election allowing voters nationwide to cast ballots over the Internet.

Fewer than 10,000 people, or 1 percent of registered voters, participated online in elections for mayors and city councils across the country, but officials hailed the experiment conducted Monday to Wednesday as a success.

Election officials in the country of 1.4 million said they had received no reports of flaws in the online voting system or hacking attempts.

Posted on Fri, Oct. 14, 2005 by JARI TANNER with the Associated Press.

Iceland's First Sitcom

Iceland’s first ever sitcom debuted last night on state television station RÚV. Kallakaffi (Karl’s Café) is set in a run-of-the-mill café which is owned by Margrét and Kalli. A little gang of quirky regulars is usually around, including Margrét’s half-brother Gísli, a bus driver, the owners’ daughter Silja, her rocker boyfriend Sjónni, and Áslákur, the medical student who is burdened with an unrequited passion for the daughter (actually the latter two haven’t appeared yet, but I took a peek at details of the upcoming episodes online). Sagafilm, the production company behind this series, says the show focuses on “grey Icelandic daily life” (think the UK’s Coronation Street with a laugh track and fewer characters).

From Iceland Review_Online, September 26, 2005.

Grid-Iron League Born

October 6, 2005
By Róbert Mosolygó

HUNGARIAN sporting history was made at the weekend with the launch of the Hungarian American Football League.

Fittingly, the opening game was played on Saturday, October 1, between the Gyôr Sharks and the Debrecen Gladiators, teams that have have been in existence since American Football first came to Hungary.

The Budapest Sun

ROMANIAN MOVIE WINS FRENCH FILM PRIZE

PARIS, Oct 16 (AFP) - The Romanian film "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu", depicting the fate of an elderly man living alone, on Sunday won top prize at the film festival of Essonne near Paris.

Directed by Cristi Puiu, it follows the struggle of an isolated 63 year-old man, who suddenly takes ill one evening and calls an ambulance, while desperately trying to hang on till help comes.

The film came first against competition from eleven other full-length movies in this annual festival of European cinema.

It also took the top prize in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes this year.

Reported Sunday, 16 October 2005 in The Tocqueville Connection.

Longevity

Only two men in U.S. baseball history have ever hit homeruns as teenagers and when they were in their forties: Ty Cobb and Rusty Staub.

As a teenaged Detroit Tiger, Cobb hit two homers; then later he had six with the Philadelphia A's after he'd turned 40. Staub had six as a teen with the Houston Astros and two as an over-40 New York Met.

From "Who Hit That Home Run?" in Parade, October 16, 2005.

It's Tradition

Two students confessed to stealing the hands of Healy Hall's westward-facing clock, bringing a two-week investigation to a close.

One of the confessors' roommates turned in the hands the day before they admitted their involvement in the incident. The hands were undamaged and can be reattached to the clock.

The two students had used temporary scaffolding erected on the west side of Healy Hall to access the building. Additional enhancements have been made to the building to prevent such incidents in the future.

The identification of the students responsible for the theft concluded an intensive investigation and a period of heightened campus interest in the incident, which the two admit said was an attempt to revive an old Georgetown tradition. Students have attempted to climb the Healy clock tower and take the hands for several decades, although the hands have only been stolen on two other occasions in the past 11 years.

It was just two buddies, it wasn't malicious at all", one of the students said. "We had no intention of keeping the hands."

His fellow participant also said he wanted to take the hands as part of a prank, not a criminal act.

"When I learned of the tradition of stealing the Healy clock hands freshman year, and reading various publications about the history associated with the tower, I decided that I eventually wanted to contribute to the survival of the tradition before I graduated," he said. "I intended no destruction or ill-will to the university in taking the hands, simply to contribute to one aspect of what makes this a special place."

The roommate, who lives with one of the two but was not involved in the theft, said he decided to turn in the hands after learning that the students were trying to find a way to return them anonymously.

Adapted from an article in The Hoya, October 14, 2005.

Where to Put the Body

MOSCOW, October 4 - Time has been unkind to Vladimir Lenin, whose remains here in Red Square are said to sprout occasional fungi, and whose ideology and party long ago fell to ruins. Now the inevitable question has returned. Should his body be moved?

Revisiting a proposal that thwarted Boris N. Yeltsin, who faced down tanks but in his time as president could not persuade Russians to remove the Soviet Union's founder from his place of honor, a senior aide to President Vladimir V. Putin raised the matter last week, saying it was time to bury the man.

"Our country has been shaken by strife, but only a few people were held accountable for that in our lifetime," said the aide, Georgi Poltavchenko. "I do not think it is fair that those who initiated the strife remain in the center of our state near the Kremlin."

Lenin, who led the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, died in 1924 at the age of 53. A near theology rose around him in the ensuing decades. But not all agree with the religion . .

"Vast funds are being squandered on a pagan show," says Nikita Mikhalkov, a prominent film director and chairman of the Russian Cultural Foundation, adding that Lenin himself wished to be buried beside his mother in St. Petersburg. "If we advocate Christian ideals, we must fulfill the will of the deceased."

Others describe an opportunist who ushered vicious cronies to power, resulting in a totalitarian police state.

"It is time to get rid of this horrible mummy," said Valeriya Novodvorskaya, head of the Democratic Union, a small reform party. "One cannot talk about any kind of democracy or civilization in Russia when Lenin is still in the country's main square." She added: "I would not care even if he were thrown on a garbage heap."

Informal polls conducted Monday by the radio station Ekho Moskvy found that 65 percent of people who called in, and 75 percent of people who contacted the station via the Internet, said that not just Lenin but all of the Soviet figures should be evicted from Red Square.

But the youngest Russian adults barely recall the Communist times, and some show little interest in looking back.

"Lenin," mused Natasha Zakharova, 23, as she walked off Red Square on Tuesday, admitting that she was not quite sure whose body she had just seen. "Was he a Communist?"

Adapted from an article appearing in The New York Times, October 5, 2005.

Wedding Rings Cause Impotence

A wedding ring, which many men constantly wear on the fourth finger, may initiate a variety of sexual disorders and eventually end up with partial or even complete impotence. A recent research work conducted by Belarussian scientists revealed that widespread beliefs of losing strong virility after many years of wearing the wedding ring on the ring finger are based on certain scientific reasons.

A well-known bio-therapist, healer Sergei Gagarin, comments on the latest scientific discovery . .

"The Slavs used to wear wedding rings for not more than four hours a day. Their sexual powers were rather strong, which can be seen in ancient Slavic tales. Slavic families traditionally had a lot of children."

He goes on to say . .

"If a man takes his wedding ring off periodically, the positive effect of the energy current on the sexual sphere manifests itself explicitly. However, if a man wears the ring all the time, the situation may change for the worse. . . On the whole, one may come to the following conclusion: those who do not wear wedding rings 24/7 may have a lot fewer problems in their sex lives."

Adapted from Pravda online, October 10, 2005.

Swiping Condoleeza

Political toilet paper will soon be launched in the Ukraine. The new paper has printed portraits of famous international political figures.

U.S. president George W. Bush, Russian leader Vladimir Putin, Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko, and British PM Tony Blair are among those who are afforded the honor of being depicted on the paper.

The toilet paper also contains the images of the Russian disgraced businessmen Boris Berezovsky and the U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

It is not reported whether the Ukrainian President Victor Yushchenko will be portrayed.

The printing house is planning to produce small lots of Political toilet paper; at the moment just 2,000 for the Ukraine. Russia and England have already placed their orders.

The paper will be rather cheap: one or two hryvnias for a roll ($ 0,2-0,4).

The Political toilet paper is printed at the Zhucheng Senke Paper-Making Co.Ltd. plant in China.

Adapted from FunReports.com, October 6, 2005.

The Truth About Quicksand

Although horror films frequently depict victims disappearing in quicksand, the truth is much tamer. People cannot fully sink into this type of soil, and laboratory simulations now bear out this little-known fact.

Quicksand is simply ordinary sand that is so saturated with water that the friction between sand particles is reduced, making them unable to support any weight.

The mixture most frequently appears near the deltas of mighty rivers. It can also form after an earthquake releases water from underground reservoirs. When quicksand causes the collapse of bridges and buildings, it truly can be dangerous, experts say.

The probability that a person will be completely sucked into the sand, on the other hand, is nil.

"The Hollywood version is just incorrect," says Thomas Zimmie, an expert in soil mechanics at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York.

Reported online in Nature magazine, September 28, 2005.

World's Easiest Quiz

1. How long did the Hundred Years War last?
   
2. Which country makes Panama hats?
   
3. From which animal do we get catgut?
   
4. In which month do Russians celebrate the October Revolution?
   
5. What is a camel's hair brush made of?
   
6. The Canary Islands in the Pacific are named after what animal?
   
7. What was King George VI's first name?
   
8. What color is a purple finch?
   
9. Where are Chinese gooseberries from?
   
10. What is the color of the black box in a commercial airplane?
    

1. 116 years.
   
2. Ecuador.
   
3. sheep and horses.
   
4. November.
   
5. squirrel fur.
   
6. dogs.
   
7. Albert.
   
8. crimson.
   
9. New Zealand.
   
10. orange.
    

He Taught Them Well

When a masked man attacked them inside their bedroom in the middle of the night Sunday, twin 10-year-old girls responded just as they had been taught in their martial arts class: they fought back.

The commotion woke their parents, who rushed in and thought they recognized the tall, pony-tailed intruder. The girls' father whacked him with the base of a table lamp and yanked off part of his mask. As the intruder ran from the Vienna townhouse, the parents were pretty sure it was "Andy," an instructor at Mountain Kim Martial Arts studio in Vienna, where their daughters take classes every week.

Hours later, Andrew Jacobs, 42, a part-time instructor at the studio who holds a black belt, was arrested at the brick house he shares with his sister, not far from the girls' home. Yesterday, he appeared in court, with a black eye and bruises on his face, on charges of assault, attempted abduction and burglary. A judge ordered him held without bond.

SOURCE: Washington Post, October 4, 2005.

1-Step Program

MOSCOW -- In the last 20 years, hundreds of thousands of people in Russia and other countries of the former Soviet Union have been "coded" against the desire to drink. "Coding" involves the manipulation of the alcoholic's psyche--often with the help of hypnosis--to create the belief that alcohol equals death.

Alcohol abuse, marked by binge drinking, has soared to all-time highs in Russia. More than 50,000 people die annually from alcohol poisoning, compared with about 400 annually in the United States. It is not unusual for Russians to consume one or more bottles of vodka at a single sitting.

For many Russians, the only available treatment is "coding", created by a Soviet psychiatrist, Alexander Dovzhenko, who assumed cult-like status in the treatment of alcoholism.

"The Dovzhenko method is basically a form of hypnosis: You drink, you die," said Andrei Yermoshin, a private psychotherapist who no longer uses the method, preferring long-term therapy. "It's fast and cheap, and supposedly you don't have a problem for a year or two years or five years, depending on how long you have been coded for."