Do you think this guy still has a job?

An Air Canada Jazz pilot who left the cockpit of his passenger jet to use a back washroom moments before landing found himself locked out upon his return, an airline official told AFP.
The pilot eventually busted into the cockpit and safely landed the Bombardier CRJ-100, but not before alarming some 50 passengers who watched him bang on the door and talk frantically with the cockpit through an onboard telephone for several minutes, according to local reports.

Air Canada Jazz spokeswoman Manon Stuart downplayed the incident, saying passengers "did not react and remained calm."

The first officer had remained on the flight deck, but was unable to open the jammed door, forcing the crew to remove it from its hinges with only 30 minutes remaining in the flight from Ottawa to Winnipeg, she said.

The first officer could have landed the jet himself and passengers were not in danger, she added.
"We investigated the incident on Saturday and the crew followed standard operational procedures. At no time was the safety or security of passengers compromised."

No explanation for the door jam was given.

"It's a very rare occurrence," Stuart said. "To the best of our knowledge, it's the first time we've encountered this problem in-flight."

Because a story with a headline such as "Naked Tickler" has to be good!

Naked 'Tickler' Targeting Sleeping Elderly Women

Investigators in New Smyrna Beach, Fla., are warning homeowners about a naked man who has broken into at least seven homes and tickled sleeping elderly women with a feather or fingers, police told Local 6 News.

Police said a man with a pony tail broke into two homes in the Sea Woods community this week between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m.

One of the victims, a 73-year-old woman, said the naked man tickled her toes and then ran out of the house.

"This is truly a bizarre case," Local 6 News reporter Tarik Minor said. "A naked man is breaking into elderly women's homes, hiding at the foot of their beds, pulling back their covers and tickling their feet and running away."

Police are worried that the man is enjoying the shock value factor of tickling the elderly women and will continue the attacks.

"It's terribly shocking," neighbor Mary Oliver said. "I think about it and a couple of times I woke up and couldn't help looking down to the foot of the bed and wondering if somebody is there ready to play with my toes. It's funny but it's not funny."

Investigators believe the tickler lives in New Smyrna Beach but they do not have a good description of the man.

The same man is suspected of breaking into homes last summer and tickling elderly women, according to the report.

Police are warning residents to be alert and take precautions to secure windows and doors.
If you have any information concerning this crime, you are urged to call Crimeline at (800) 423-TIPS.

Why can't we just leave it alone?

Now my children won't know the same solar system I learned in school.


Pluto loses status as a planet

Pluto's status has been contested for many yearsAstronomers meeting in the Czech capital have voted to strip Pluto of its status as a planet.

About 2,500 experts were in Prague for the International Astronomical Union's (IAU) general assembly.

The scientists rejected a proposal that would have retained Pluto as a planet and brought three other objects into the cosmic club.

Pluto has been considered a planet since its discovery in 1930 by the American Clyde Tombaugh.

The ninth planet will now effectively be airbrushed out of school and university textbooks.
The astronomers at the IAU meeting voted by raising their yellow ballot papers for a count.
"The eight planets are Mercury, Earth, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune," said the IAU resolution, which was passed following a week of stormy debate.

PLUTO - A 'DEMOTED PLANET'

Named after underworld god
Average of 5.9bn km to Sun
Orbits Sun every 248 years
Diameter of 2,360km
Has at least three moons
Rotates every 6.8 days
Gravity about 6% of Earth's
Surface temperature -233C
Nasa probe visits in 2015

The IAU's initial proposal to raise the number of planets in the Solar System to 12, adding the asteroid Ceres, Pluto's "moon" Charon and the distant object known as 2003 UB313, met with opposition.

Robin Catchpole, of the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, UK, told the BBC News website: "My own personal opinion was to leave things as they were; I met Clyde Tombaugh and thought how nice it was to shake hands with someone who had discovered a planet.

"But since the IAU brought out the proposal for new planets I had been against it - it was going to be very confusing. The best of the alternatives was to leave the major planets as they are and then demote Pluto. So I think this is a far superior situation."

Louis Friedman, executive director of the Planetary Society in California commented: "The classification doesn't matter. Pluto - and all Solar System objects - are mysterious and exciting new worlds that need to be explored and better understood."

Dwarf planet
Pluto's status has been contested for many years as it is further away and considerably smaller than the eight other planets in our Solar System.

Its orbit around the Sun is also highly inclined to the plane of the big planets in the Solar System.
In addition, since the early 1990s, astronomers have found several objects of comparable size to Pluto in an outer region of the Solar System called the Kuiper Belt.

Some astronomers have long argued that Pluto belongs with this population of small, icy "dwarf planets", not with the objects we call planets.

Allowances were once made for Pluto on account of its size. At just 2,360km (1,467 miles) across, Pluto is smaller even than some moons in the Solar System. But until recently, it was still the biggest known object in the Kuiper Belt.

That changed with the discovery of 2003 UB313 by Professor Mike Brown and colleagues at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). After being measured with the Hubble Space Telescope, it was shown to be some 3,000km (1,864 miles) in diameter, making it larger than Pluto.

Named after the god of the underworld in Roman mythology, Pluto orbits the Sun at an average distance of 5.9 billion kilometres (3.7 billion miles) taking 247.9 Earth years to complete a single circuit of the Sun.

An unmanned US spacecraft, New Horizons, is due to fly by Pluto and the Kuiper Belt in 2015.

Somebody thought it was news-worthy. . .

A TV news channel is facing embarrassment and ridicule after mistakenly showing a porn movie in the background of a news broadcast over the weekend.

Viewers of a 5-minute news update at midnight Saturday could see explicit scenes from a Czech porn movie on a TV screen behind Sweden's SVT news anchor Peter Dahlgren.

The monitor - one of many on the wall of a control room visible behind the studio - normally shows other news channels during broadcasts.

But staffers who earlier in the evening had watched a sports event on cable channel Canal Plus - which often shows X-rated films after midnight - had forgotten to switch it back, said news director Per Yng.

"This is highly embarrassing and unfortunate," Yng said. "It must not happen again."
A producer quickly spotted the sex scenes and ran into the control room and turned off the monitor, Yng said.

He said there had been no complaints from viewers about the mishap, but "enormous interest from media."

Swedish tabloids on Monday poked fun at the steamy broadcast, jokingly changing the name of the show - Rapport - to "Rapporn."

Magnus Akerlund, who oversees the hourly news updates, told tabloid Expressen he was "shocked and dismayed" at the mistake.

"It's a huge blunder by us," he said.

Father of the Year Award:

Police: Dad accused of DUI said 4-year-old was at wheel
The Associated Press

WELLERSBURG -- A man accused of drunken driving told state police that his 4-year-old son was at the wheel of his sport utility vehicle when it crashed into a tree.

Albert Monroe Boyce Jr., 33, of Hyndman, told police that his son was sitting on his lap and turned the wheel too far to one side, sending the SUV off the road.

Boyce faces a preliminary hearing Sept. 21 on charges of drunken driving, child endangerment, reckless endangerment and driving without a license.

No phone number for Boyce could be found. Court records do not indicate that he has an attorney, district court officials said.

Boyce received facial injuries in the crash, and the child was treated and released for unspecified injuries, authorities said.

Boyce had an open 30-pack of Budweiser and a cooler in the vehicle when the crash occurred July 14, police said.

Bad idea, bad idea, bad idea. . .

Mammoths may roam again after 27,000 years

By Mark Henderson, Science Editor

BODIES of extinct Ice Age mammals, such as woolly mammoths, that have been frozen in permafrost for thousands of years may contain viable sperm that could be used to bring them back from the dead, scientists said yesterday.

Research has indicated that mammalian sperm can survive being frozen for much longer than was previously thought, suggesting that it could potentially be recovered from species that have died out.

Several well-preserved mammoth carcasses have been found in the permafrost of Siberia, and scientists estimate that there could be millions more.

Last year a Canadian team demonstrated that it was possible to extract DNA from the specimens, and announced the sequencing of about 1 per cent of the genome of a mammoth that died about 27,000 years ago.

With access to the mammoth’s genetic code, and with frozen sperm recovered from testes, it may be possible to resurrect an animal that is very similar to a mammoth.

The mammoth is a close genetic cousin of the modern Asian elephant, and scientists think that the two may be capable of interbreeding.

The frozen mammoth sperm could be injected into elephant eggs, producing offspring that would be 50 per cent mammoth.

The suggestion that it may be possible to recreate an animal that is at least part-mammoth has emerged from a study of mice by Japanese, British and American scientists.

While many types of mammalian sperm, including that of humans, can be preserved by freezing, mouse sperm is vulnerable to damage that can limit its ability to fertilise eggs when it is thawed.
A team led by Narumi Ogonuki of the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research Bioresource Centre in Tsukuba, central Japan, has demonstrated that sperm better survives freezing if testes, or whole mouse bodies, are frozen.

Even sperm taken from mouse bodies that had been frozen 15 years ago was capable of fertilising mouse eggs and producing pups, the researchers found.

The work has technical implications for the breeding of laboratory mice for medical research, but it also shows in principle that mammalian sperm can survive in a body that has been frozen for several years.

This could mean that it is able to survive in similar fashion over much longer periods, as in mammoths frozen in permafrost.

“Restoration of extinct species could be possible if male individuals are found in permafrost,” Dr Ogonuki said.

“If sperm of extinct mammalian species, for example the woolly mammoth, can be retrieved from animal bodies that were kept frozen for millions of years in permanent frost, live animals might be restored by injecting them into oocytes [eggs] from females of closely related species.”


There's a reason these things are dead.

And it ain't global Warming, either.

Leave 'em dead.