Harriet's Happenings (THE NEWS)

Works fine for me; I signed it too.

http://news.ninemsn.com.au/technology/8292296/woman-buys-wood-block-she-thought-was-ipad

A US woman thought she had snared a bargain when she forked out $168 for what she believed was an iPad, only to discover she had just purchased a very expensive piece of wood.

Ashley McDowell, 22, bought the item from two men in the parking lot of a McDonald's restaurant in Spartanburg county, South Carolina overnight.

The men said they had bought the iPads in bulk and were selling them for only $280, a sharp reduction from the $465 US retail price.

Ms McDowell told the men she only had $168, which they accepted, giving her a FedEx box which they assured her had an iPad inside.

It was not until Ms McDowell was driving home that she opened the package and realised she had just bought a block of wood with a painted on Apple logo.

The screen was also painted on, framed with black tape and had stickers attached representing a web browser, email inbox and iPhoto.

"Basically what they'd done is taken a screenshot of an iPad screen turned on, with a copy of a Best Buy sales ticket on front. On the back they'd pasted a cut-out of the Apple logo," Lieutenant Tony Ivey, a public information officer at the Spartanburg County Sheriff's Office said, The Smoking Gun reports

I lost my appetite.

LIWnut wrote:

I lost my appetite.

Me too, Marilyn!

Vanesa.

Brave man!

http://news.yahoo.com/man-dives-moving-jeep-driver-blacks-014648502.html

ATLANTA (AP) — A man jumped into an out-of-control Jeep as it drifted across lanes of traffic on a bustling parkway and steered the vehicle safely into a guardrail after its driver suffered a seizure, authorities said.

Christopher Sanders said he blacked out on his way home from work Thursday in Columbus, a west Georgia city. Police later told him his Jeep Cherokee was weaving through fast-moving traffic and had slowed dangerously on a busy parkway before the good Samaritan came to the rescue.

"It's a blessing that he was actually there and did what he did," Sanders told The Associated Press on Wednesday. "The situation could have gone dozens of different ways, but it went the best possible way."

With other cars whizzing past at around 65 mph, the Jeep had slowed to between 10 and 15 mph when help came, according to the account.

Police said Michael Perry had parked his own vehicle and began running after Sanders' Jeep, yanked open the passenger door, climbed in and then guided it into the guardrail.

"He risked his own life in the process," Sanders said in a telephone interview. "He didn't have to do what he did."

Sanders, 27, said he began having seizures about 10 years ago, but never experienced one while driving. He said he's been able to keep them in check, but Thursday's seizure was a violent one. He said doctors aren't certain of the cause, but he says he was shot in the neck during a robbery years ago and thinks that may have helped trigger the seizures.

Sanders said Perry banged up his leg after it got caught between the Jeep and the guardrail, but neither man was seriously harmed.

Columbus police say Perry's actions averted a potential disaster on the busy road and might have saved Sanders' life.

"It could have gone very, very badly," Sgt. Mark Graydon told the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer. "It was unbelievable. Everything worked right, and it was pretty miraculous."

Sanders and Perry are both from Phenix City, just across the state line in Alabama.

http://news.yahoo.com/earth-satellite-hit-where-175412638.html



CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (AP) — NASA scientists are doing their best to tell us where a plummeting six-ton satellite will fall later this week. It's just that if they're off a little bit, it could mean the difference between hitting Florida or landing on New York. Or, say, Iran or India.

Pinpointing where and when hurtling space debris will strike is an imprecise science. For now, scientists predict the earliest it will hit is Thursday U.S. time, the latest Saturday. The strike zone covers most of Earth.

Not that citizens need to take cover. The satellite will break into pieces, and NASA put the chances that somebody somewhere will get hurt at just 1-in-3,200.

As far as anyone knows, falling space debris has never injured anyone. Nor has significant property damage been reported. That's because most of the planet is covered in water and there are vast regions of empty land.

If you do come across what you suspect is a satellite piece, NASA doesn't want you to pick it up. The space agency says there are no toxic chemicals present, but there could be sharp edges. Also, it's government property. It's against the law to keep it as a souvenir or sell it on eBay. NASA's advice is to report it to the police.

The 20-year-old research satellite is expected to break into more than 100 pieces as it enters the atmosphere, most of it burning up. Twenty-six of the heaviest metal parts are expected to reach Earth, the biggest chunk weighing about 300 pounds (136 kilograms). The debris could be scattered over an area about 500 miles (800 kilometers) long.

Jonathan McDowell, for one, isn't worried. He is in the potential strike zone — along with most of the world's 7 billion citizens. McDowell is with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

"There's stuff that's heavy that falls out of the sky almost every year," McDowell says. So far this year, he noted, two massive Russian rocket stages have taken the plunge.

As for the odds of the satellite hitting someone, "it's a small chance. We take much bigger chances all the time in our lives," McDowell says. "So I'm not putting my tin helmet on or hiding under a rock."

All told, 1,200 pounds (544 kilograms) of wreckage is expected to smack down — the heaviest pieces made of titanium, stainless steel or beryllium. That represents just one-tenth the mass of the satellite, which stretches 35 feet (10.7 meters) long and 15 feet (4.6 meters) in diameter.

The strike zone straddles all points between latitudes 57 degrees north and 57 degrees south. That's as far north as Edmonton and Alberta, Canada, and Aberdeen, Scotland, and as far south as Cape Horn, the southernmost tip of South America. Every continent but Antarctica is in the crosshairs.

Back when UARS, the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite, was launched to study the ozone layer in 1991, NASA didn't always pay attention to the "what goes up must come down" rule. Nowadays, satellites must be designed either to burn up on re-entering the atmosphere or to have enough fuel to be steered into a watery grave or up into a higher, long-term orbit.

The International Space Station — the largest manmade structure ever to orbit the planet — is no exception. NASA has a plan to bring it down safely sometime after 2020.

Russia's old Mir station came down over the Pacific, in a controlled re-entry, in 2001. But one of its predecessors, Salyut 7, fell uncontrolled through the atmosphere in 1991. The most recent uncontrolled return of a large NASA satellite was in 2002.

The most sensational case of all was Skylab, the early U.S. space station whose impending demise three decades ago alarmed people around the world and touched off a guessing game as to where it might land. It plummeted harmlessly into the Indian Ocean and onto remote parts of Australia in July 1979.

The $740 million UARS was decommissioned in 2005, after NASA lowered its orbit with the little remaining fuel on board. NASA didn't want to keep it up longer than necessary, for fear of a collision or an exploding fuel tank, either of which would have left a lot of space litter.

Predicting where the satellite will strike is a little like predicting the weather several days out, says NASA orbital debris scientist Mark Matney.

Experts expect to have a good idea by Thursday of when and where UARS might fall, Matney says. They won't be able to pinpoint the exact time, but they should be able to narrow it to a few hours.

Given the spacecraft's orbital speed of 17,500 mph (28,162 kph), or 5 miles (8 kilometers) per second, a prediction that is off by just a few minutes could mean a 1,000-mile (1,609-kilometer) error. It probably won't be clear where it fell until afterward, Matney says.

If it happens in darkness, it should be visible.

"If someone is lucky enough to be near the re-entry at nighttime, they'll get quite a show," says Matney, who works at Johnson Space Center in Houston, also in the potential strike zone.

Space junk in general is on the rise, much of it destroyed or broken satellites and chunks of used rockets. More than 20,000 manmade objects at least 4 inches (10.2 centimeters) in diameter are being tracked in orbit.

It's mostly a threat to astronauts in space, rather than people on Earth. In June, the six residents of the International Space Station took shelter in their docked Soyuz lifeboats because of passing debris. The unidentified object came within 1,100 feet (335.2 meters) of the complex, the closest call yet.

___

Online:

NASA: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/uars/index.html


Ummm...this WILL be interesting!

Talk about "Till Death Do Us Part"....

Couple Married 72 years, Die Holding Hands

DES MOINES, Iowa — An Iowa couple married for 72 years died holding hands in a Des Moines hospital within 70 minutes of each other last week after a car accident that also injured another couple.

"They're very old-fashioned. They believed in marriage 'til death do you part," Dennis Yeager, the son of Gordon and Norma Yeager, told ketv.com.

The accident that claimed Gordon, 94, and Norma Yeager, 90, happened Oct. 12, when the couple left their State Center home for a drive shortly after 8 a.m. At the intersection of Highway 30 and Jessup Avenue, just west of Marshalltown, Gordon pulled "away from the stop sign and failed to yield to a westbound vehicle," according to Sgt. Joel Ehler of the Iowa State Patrol.

The driver of the other car, Charles Clapsaddle, 64, of Marshalltown, was unable to stop to avoid a collision, Ehler said.

Clapsaddle was treated and released from Marshalltown Medical & Surgical Center, but his wife, Barbara, was reportedly transferred to Methodist Medical Center in Des Moines. A man who identified himself as their son, John, said in a comment published on a story on the Times-Republican website that his mother suffered internal bleeding and a broken neck.

“She is currently stable but remains in the critical care unit,” he wrote. “There will be a long road ahead for her recovery.

Ehler said Yeager was facing pending action by the Iowa Department of Transportation to have his license removed, but citing privacy concerns, said he could release no additional details on what prompted that action.

The Yeagers' children told ketv.com that their parents never liked being apart ever since Norma Stock married Gordon Yeager on May 26, 1939, in State Center. And they were relieved that the couple was able to spend their last moments together at the intensive care unit of the Marshalltown hospital.

"They brought them in the same room in intensive care and put them together — and they were holding hands in ICU. They were not really responsive," Dennis Yeager told ketv.com.

Gordon died at 3:38 p.m. surrounded by their family and holding hands with Norma.

"It was really strange, they were holding hands, and dad stopped breathing but I couldn't figure out what was going on because the heart monitor was still going," said Dennis Yeager. "But we were like, he isn't breathing. How does he still have a heart beat? The nurse checked and said that's because they were holding hands and it's going through them. Her heart was beating through him and picking it up."

..Norma died at 4:48 p.m., according to ketv.com.

"Neither one of them would've wanted to be without each other. I couldn't figure out how it was going to work," the Yeagers' daughter Donna Sheets told ketv.com. "We were very blessed, honestly, that they went this way."

The Yeager’s children said the couple complemented each other.

"Anybody come over — she was the hostess with the mostess. ... The more she did, the more she smiled," Dennis Yeager told ketv.com. "Dad would be the center of attention, like, 'Wheee look at me,' and mom was like 'get him away from me!' You know we even got a picture like that."

And even though they argued every now and them, "They just loved being together," he said.

"He said 'I have to stick around. I can't go until she does because I have to stay here for her and she would say the same thing,'" he said.

The couple reportedly were holding hands Tuesday at their funeral in their casket. Their family said the plan was to cremate them together and mix their ashes.

Together for 72 years! I've always admired these kind of lovers who could be really living under the same roof for decades, loving each other.

Norma and Gordon are examples for us all. They died tragically, yes, but at least they were holding hands. Together. I think they entered to Paradise, still holding hands.

Vanesa.

http://www.godvine.com/A-Couple-Married-72-Years-Dies-Holding-Hands-752.html

here is a video about the couple mentioned above.

okay this is weird....My maiden name is Yaerger...pronounced Yeager as this is. And we also knew a family by the name of Sheets. I've got a chill!

LIWnut wrote:

http://www.godvine.com/A-Couple-Married-72-Years-Dies-Holding-Hands-752.html

here is a video about the couple mentioned above.

Thanks, Marilyn...They died like they lived: holding hands.

Vanesa.

Vanesa wrote:

Together for 72 years! I've always admired these kind of lovers who could be really living under the same roof for decades, loving each other.

Norma and Gordon are examples for us all. They died tragically, yes, but at least they were holding hands. Together. I think they entered to Paradise, still holding hands.

Vanesa.

Vanesa, what you wrote gave me almost as many goosebumps as the story. This is just a beautiful story....thank you so much for sharing it Rhonda. And for the video Marilyn!

http://gma.yahoo.com/switched-birth-girls-want-stay-wrong-moms-160048481.html

A pair of 12-year-old girls who discovered they were accidentally switched at birth want to stay with the mothers who have been raising them rather than go to their real parents.

um.wow

Did anyone see this?

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/samoa-to-move-dateline-to-bring-timezone-in-line-with-pacific-neighbours/story-fnb64oi6-1226231715683

FOR more than a century Samoa has been ever behind the times: five hours behind New York, ten hours behind London and nearly a day behind Sydney.

Its western shore, where Samoans once swaddled their dead in matting and floated them in canoes towards the setting sun, was the place where tonight (Wednesday) will be tonight (Wednesday) for a little later than anywhere else on the planet.

This fact, a staple of the islands' tourism brochures, will be true for one final glorious sunset tomorrow (Thursday) night. Then Samoans will make a bold leap into the future. Going to bed on a Thursday, they will awake on Saturday morning, having skipped Friday, December 30, 2011, ready to ring in the new year ahead of most of the rest of the world.

This great leap forward, made possible by shifting the international dateline west of their archipelago, was proposed by Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi this year. The islanders went the other way in 1892, following lobbying by merchants who did most of their business with America and Europe, and marked the occasion by celebrating America's Independence Day for two days in a row.

The world has changed. Australia and New Zealand provide half the country's imports and buy 85 per cent of Samoa's exports, yet the Australasian companies with which the Samoans do business are always nearly a day ahead of them. Samoa needs to move with the times. It needs to go back to the future.

"In doing business with New Zealand and Australia we're losing out on two working days a week," Mr Tuilaepa said. "While it's Friday here, it's Saturday in New Zealand and when we're at church Sunday, they're already conducting business in Sydney and Brisbane."

A few tour guides have grumbled at the loss of a long-established selling point. But the Prime Minister is hoping the change will go as smoothly as when he led a switch from left-hand to right-hand drive in 2009, and he has even pointed out how the time change can still be an attraction for tourists.

Known as Western Samoa until 1997, Samoa has a neighbour to the east, American Samoa, that will still be languishing in yesterday (Tuesday), long after Samoans are looking forward to tomorrow (Thursday).

"You can have two birthdays, two weddings and two wedding anniversaries on the same date on separate days in less than an hour's flight, without leaving the Samoan chain," the Prime Minister said.

Revellers suffering a double hangover may then attempt to skip the morning after entirely, and fly straight on to tomorrow (Thursday).


The Times

Just read this article.
Sad to read about the Coreys and how they were treated...

Article: http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/recent-hollywood-pedophilia-charges-just-the-tip-of-the-iceberg-former-chil

not cool

I heard about this. Very sad stuff.

Wow, it certainly does explain a lot about their problems in adulthood. Thank God Corey Feldman came out the other side and was able to heal. I only wish the same could have been true for Corey Haim.

A United Boeing 737-800, registration N37290 performing flight UA-1571 from Fort Lauderdale,FL to Chicago O'Hare,IL (USA), was on final approach to O'Hare's runway 27L when the crew reported a flock of ducks was tracking localizer 27L outbound at 1200 feet MSL and added they were doing a dandy job on it too. Tower warned the next arrival about the ducks heading their way. All ducks and aircraft landed safely at their destinations.

I thought this was some pretty big news, worth sharing!


James Cameron never ceases to amaze me:

http://news.yahoo.com/james-cameron-reaches-deepest-spot-earth-223416087.html

I heard he was going to do this. BRAVE!

I thought he already made history with Titanic....lol

Wow. Just wow.