VIENNA, Va. -- For a Virginia doctor, squirrels are a man's best friend, too. Thomas Shepler, a hand surgeon, shot a hawk to death in his backyard when he said the bird was eyeing a young squirrel that he and his wife had helped raise.
Shepler, 65, said the hawk had previously killed an adult squirrel near his suburban Washington home in Vienna. When the doctor tried to chase away the bird over the weekend by yelling and throwing a crowbar at it, the hawk didn't leave the area. So Shepler got a shotgun and killed it.
A police officer heard the shot Saturday and Shepler was arrested. He was charged with discharging a firearm in public and cruelty to animals. Shepler says he cares about animals and is feeling a lot of anxiety and embarrassment over the shooting.
[Via - KiroTV]
Ark. man left the phone at a McDonald's; he's now suing for $3 million. Guess why?
Friday, February 20, 2009
Weird Facts - Man Charged With Killing Hawk To Help Squirrel
Monday, November 24, 2008
Ark. man left the phone at a McDonald's; he's now suing for $3 million. Guess why?
Here's some food for thought: If you have nude photos of your wife on your cell phone, hang onto it.
Phillip Sherman of Arkansas learned that lesson after he left his phone behind at a McDonald's restaurant and the photos ended up online. Now he and his wife, Tina, are suing the McDonald's Corp., the franchise owner and the store manager.
The suit was filed Friday and seeks a jury trial and $3 million in damages for suffering, embarrassment and the cost of having to move to a new home.
The suit says that Phillip Sherman left the phone the Fayetteville store in July and that employees promised to secure it until he returned.
Manager Aaron Brummley declined to comment, and other company officials didn't return messages.
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Stick added to the National Toy Hall of Fame - Weird Facts
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The lowly stick, a universal plaything powered by a child's imagination, landed in the National Toy Hall of Fame on Thursday along with the Baby Doll and the skateboard.
The three were chosen to join the Strong National Museum of Play's lineup of 38 classics ranging from the bicycle, the kite and Mr. Potato Head to Crayola crayons, marbles and the Atari 2600 video game system.
Curators said the stick was a special addition in the spirit of a 2005 inductee, the cardboard box. They praised its all-purpose, no-cost, recreational qualities, noting its ability to serve either as raw material or an appendage transformed in myriad ways by a child's creativity.
"It's very open-ended, all-natural, the perfect price — there aren't any rules or instructions for its use," said Christopher Bensch, the museum's curator of collections. "It can be a Wild West horse, a medieval knight's sword, a boat on a stream or a slingshot with a rubber band. ... No snowman is complete without a couple of stick arms, and every campfire needs a stick for toasting marshmallows.
"This toy is so fantastic that it's not just for humans anymore. You can find otters, chimps and dogs — especially dogs — playing with it."
Longevity is a key criterion for getting into the hall, which the museum acquired in 2002 from A.C. Gilbert's Discovery Village in Salem, Ore. Each toy must not only be widely recognized and foster learning, creativity or discovery through play, but also endure in popularity over generations.
While dolls have been around since ancient times, the Baby Doll with its realistic newborn features emerged in the late 18th century and has been through hundreds of incarnations. Today's models can crawl, drink and even talk via voice-activated commands.
"It is generally thought of as lovable and cuddly, even if it can doze off or cry during play," said Susan Asbury, an associate curator. "Toy designers have spent decades making it ever more lifelike and true to form. ... It promotes imaginative play and brings out the nurturing side in all of us."
The first skateboarders in the 1950s cruised walkways on California beaches trying to match the speed, turns and tricks performed by surfers they watched offshore.
Apart from being fun, practicing ollies, grinds and primos "promotes individualism ... artistic expression and it's also very athletic," skateboard icon Tony Hawk said in a video message played at the induction ceremony.
[Via madconomist.com]
Saturday, September 27, 2008
Weird Facts: In the 1990s, your family came for dinner. Now they're moving in.
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The number of parents, siblings and other relatives who live with adult heads of households grew 42% from 2000 to 2007, according to data released Tuesday by the U.S. Census Bureau.
Leading the way: parents, up 67%, to 3.6 million.
The figures suggest it isn't only elderly parents moving in. The number of parents under 65 in these households increased by 75%, and those 65 and older were up 62%. Both groups outpaced the increase in the number of people in family households overall, which is up 6% since 2000.
"This is just a major trend," says Stephanie Coontz, a family history professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., who directs research at the Council on Contemporary Families.
Coontz suspects that a host of factors — among them higher housing costs and the nation's struggling economy — are prompting families to combine expenses. Also, intergenerational households are more common among the country's growing number of immigrants, she says.
But Coontz also notes that parent-child relationships are closer now than in the past. The downside, she says, is the emergence of the so-called helicopter parent who may hover too closely, but the upside is a tighter bond between generations and, in many cases, closer friendships between grown children and their parents. "I don't know how many of my students have told me, 'This may sound weird, but I talk to my parents more than I talk to my friends.' "
The average size of both families and households grew from 2000 to 2007, the data show, after shrinking slightly in the 1990s. The average family in 2007 had 3.2 people, up from 3.14 in 2000. The average household, which includes those in which someone lives alone, had 2.61 people in 2007, up from 2.59 in 2000.
Among other factors changing households:
• A 40% increase in the number of other live-in relatives, including the head of household's mother-in-law or father-in-law, to 6.8 million.
• A 24% increase in the number of live-in brothers and sisters, to 3.5 million in 2007.
• An 8% increase in non-relatives, including unmarried partners and roommates, to 6.2 million.
• Alaska had the highest percentage change in parents living with householders, up 167%. South Dakota had the lowest, still up 7%.
The Census Bureau's annual American Community Survey collects data from about 3 million U.S. households each year.
[Via - USAToday.Com]
Friday, September 19, 2008
Scientists to use satellites to count kangaroo rats | Weird facts
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FRESNO, Calif. — Scientists plan to use satellite photos to count Giant Kangaroo Rats, the first-ever monitoring of an endangered species from outer space.
Scientists will examine images taken from the same satellite used by Israeli defense forces to find the circular patches of earth denuded by the rats as they gather food around their burrows. From that they plan to get the first-ever accurate population count of the rodents, a bellwether for the health of a parched plains environment.
By comparing the photos to 30 years of satellite images being released this month by the U.S. Geological Survey, researchers hope to better understand how the population has fluctuated in response to climate change and as the arrival of state and federal canal water turned the arid San Joaquin Valley into a patchwork of intensely cultivated farms and forced Giant Kangaroo Rats to concentrate on higher ground.
The information will help scientists determine when cattle might be used to reduce nonnative grasses, allowing the rats to more easily find food.
This study using satellite technology is taking place on the vast Carrizo Plain, a 390-square-mile desert grassland 150 miles southwest of here that is home to the most concentrated remaining populations of kangaroo rats.
The technology replaces trapping and tedious airplane fly-overs as a means of taking census.
"It allows us to more quickly recognize whether populations are declining where we want them to exist," said Scott Butterfield, a biologist with of The Nature Conservancy. "If they go below a threshold, that is when we would consider intervening."
Giant Kangaroo Rats, nocturnal rodents so named because they hop on back legs, adapted to their desert environment by extracting moisture from seeds and in their nasal passages from the humid air they exhale. For food, they pile seeds from native grasses in circles outside their burrows, which provide shelter for the endangered San Joaquin antelope squirrel and blunt-nosed lizards. Their fat five-inch bodies are a favored source of food for the endangered kit fox.
High rainfall encourages the growth of taller nonnative grasses, which overrun the shorter grasses that kangaroo rats depend on for food. Less food means fewer offspring. When kangaroo rats decline, so do the endangered native plant and animal species that depend on them for survival, the researchers say.
Determining at what point rainfall affects foraging will help the U.S. Bureau of Land Management establish grazing policy to control nonnative grasses and encourage a healthy kangaroo rat population.
"Without them the entire ecosystem would go out of whack," said Tim Bean, a doctoral student with the department of environmental policy and management at the University of California, Berkeley. "It's fairly rare for something so small to be a keystone species. It's easier to track, say, bison."
Farming has taken 90 percent of the kangaroo rat habitat since the middle of the last century.
The Carrizo Plain National Monument is California's largest remaining undisturbed tract of grasslands similar in biology and geography to the San Joaquin Valley, and it supports many plant and animal species that once thrived on the valley floor.
"Carrizo is like a Yosemite for grasslands, and there are decisions people are learning to make to manage it in a way that preserves its natural state," Bean said. "Since the kangaroo rat is so important to its function, we've got to get a handle on it."
[Via - WRAL]
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Weird Facts: Slovakia's women's ice hockey pummels Bulgaria 82-0
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BRATISLAVA, Slovakia (AP) -- With more goals than minutes in the game, Slovakia's women's ice hockey team claimed an amazing 82-0 victory over Bulgaria in Olympic qualifying.
Slovakia outshot the Bulgarians 139-0 during the 60-minute game, played in Latvia. The margin of victory is a record for a women's International Ice Hockey Federation-sanctioned event.
"We took it as training," Slovakia coach Miroslav Karafiat said after Saturday's game.
Janka Culikova led Slovakia with 10 goals, while Martina Velickova scored nine. Fourteen different players scored at least one goal.
Slovakia, which also beat Croatia, Latvia and Italy, advanced to another qualifying group with Germany, Kazakhstan and France. The winner will secure a spot at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics.
Bulgaria was eliminated after scoring one goal and conceding 192 in the tournament.
The Slovakian men's team clinched its biggest ever victory against the Bulgarians 14 years ago when they won 20-0.
Copyright 2008 Associated Press.
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Friday, September 5, 2008
Weird Facts: Help-wanted ad for nanny: `My kids are a pain'
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NEW YORK (AP) - It was an unusually honest ad for a live-in nanny, a 1,000-word tome beginning, "My kids are a pain." But it worked, attracting a brave soul who's never been a nanny before.
"If you cannot multitask, or communicate without being passive aggressive, don't even bother replying," Rebecca Land Soodak, a mother of four on Manhattan's Upper East Side, wrote Aug. 19 in her advertisement on Craigslist.
"I can be a tad difficult to work for. I'm loud, pushy and while I used to think we paid well, I am no longer sure."
This being the age of instant communications, the ad took on a life of its own, making the rounds of parenting blogs and e-mail inboxes and inspiring an article in Thursday's New York Times.
Soodak, a 40-year-old painter whose husband owns a wine store, eventually hired Christina Wynn, a 25-year-old University of Virginia graduate, to take care of Rubin, 12; Ellis, 9; and Shay and Cassie, both 6.
"I made a commitment to stay in the job for at least a year," Wynn told the Times. "I met the oldest child, but not the others, which my mother said was crazy - to accept the job without meeting all the kids. So we'll see." She noted that one of the pluses is that the children are all in school for several hours each day.
Some other excerpts from the listing: "If you are fundamentally unhappy with your life, you will be more unhappy if you take this job, so do us all a favor and get some treatment or move to the Rockies, but do not apply for employment with us."
And this: "Also, if you suspect all wealthy women are frivolous, we are not for you."
And this: "I have all sorts of theories on how to stack my dishwasher, and if you are judgmental about Ritalin for ADHD, or think such things are caused by too much sugar, again, deal-break city."
No word yet on whether a sequel to "The Nanny Diaries" is in the works. Meanwhile, Soodak tells the Times: "I hope she likes it here. I sent the ad to one of my old sitters and she said she felt it was pretty accurate, which sort of stung a little bit."
[Via - MyWay.Com]
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