Cave News

Bright idea - street lighting on demand in Germany

Street lights are just a call away in many German towns. They call it “Dial4Light.”

Every night at 11 p.m. the village of Dörentrup in central Germany is thrown into total darkness. For the past few years, the village's cash-strapped local council has been switching off all the streetlights in the village each evening until 6 a.m. the following morning.

No street lights would have residents stumbling around in the dark. But in Dörentrup they have seen the light (pun intended).

They have a program that allows residents to turn on streetlights on demand using their cell phones.

In the first project of its kind in Europe, the residents of Dörentrup can now switch on the lights on a specific street whenever they like.

All they have to do is register for the scheme online and provide a phone number. Then each time anyone needs to see in the dark, they call the Dial4Light number, enter the six-digit code that corresponds to the stretch of road they want lit, and within seconds the lights are on.

After a resident uses the Dial4Light scheme, the street lights in that area stay on for 15 minutes.

Link

Feet of liberty

A fragment of the Statue of Liberty is pictured in front of the Bodensee lake during a rehearsal for AIDA at the sea stage on June 17, 2009 in Bregenz, Austria.

New glass balconies on Sears Tower 103rd floor

Visitors to the Sears Tower in Chicago are now treated to unobstructed views of the city from the building's west side and a heart-stopping vista of the street and Chicago River below – for those brave enough to look straight down.

These balconies are not for the faint of heart. Don’t go near them if your are petrified of heights.

The balconies are suspended 1,353 feet (412 meters) in the air and jut out 4 feet (1.22 meters) from the building's 103rd floor Skydeck. They're actually more like boxes than balconies, with transparent walls, floor and ceiling.

The box shaped balconies are made of glass 1.4 inches thick and can hold five tons.

Sears Tower officials have said the inspiration for the balconies came from the hundreds of forehead prints visitors left behind on Skydeck windows
every week. Now, staff will have a new glass surface to clean: floors.

The balconies are just one of the big changes coming to the Sears Tower in Chicago. The building's name will also. Later this summer the building will become the Willis Tower.

Link

Obama assured of chilly reception in Russian

The Obamamania that has swept much of the rest of the world will it be absent when Mr.Obama meets with Russian president Dmitri Medvedev for a summit meeting.

A recent poll by Russia's Levada Centre found only 23 per cent of citizens believe the US president will "do the right thing in world affairs", with many doubting his promise of change will heal antagonisms between Russia and the West.

Makes a difference when the Russian media doesn’t swoon all over him as the US media does.

A long list of issues – from Nato's eastward expansion, to missile defence, to human rights, to the contest for oil and gas in Central Asia – continue to poison relations between the former Cold War superpowers.

Obama will need to have his teleprompters working as they never have before because the Russians see him for what he is.

Russian news agency Pravda was less than subtle in an editorial summing up the Obama administration, headlined: "Obama: Deceiver, cheat, swindler, liar, fraudster, con-artist."

Yes, Pravda gets it!

Link

Independence Day 2009

...testing remote advance posting

Ain’t comin’ out ‘till the firecrackers stop

British comedy actress Mollie Sugden dies at 86

Mollie Sugden was one of a select group of British performers to achieve national treasure status. She was noted for her portrayal of fearsome battleaxes.

Sugden was best known for playing the bossy sales lady Mrs. Slocombe (shown above) in the long-running BBC sitcom Are You Being Served.

The innuendo-laden television comedy was successfully exported for several years and is still being shown on public broadcasting stations in America.

Mollie Sugden is shown above at the funeral of her Are You Being Served co-star Wendy Richard earlier this year. Richard lost her long battle with cancer at age 65.

Link

Minnesotan’s must be sooo proud

(click on picture to enlarge)

Link

Watchful eye

A man vacuums near a replica of the face of the Statue of Liberty in the statue's visitor center in New York City.

Tourists will be allowed to visit the top of the statue again beginning July 4th.

Baby gorilla at Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha

This 12-day-old gorilla was born to Timu, the world’s first test tube gorilla.

Go after ACORN says judge

A judge in Pennsylvania says somebody has to go after ACORN.

A district judge in southwestern Pennsylvania, who held another ACORN worker for trial on election law violations, urged prosecutors to go after the real culprit, the organization that employed him - ACORN.

"Somebody has to go after ACORN," Senior District Judge Richard H. Zoller said about the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN)

The judge said it's happening all over the country. “All you have to do is turn on the television," he said, referring to voter registration fraud charges brought recently against ACORN and its workers in Nevada.

More of the story here.

Worlds longest yard sale

This gigantic four-day yard sale is held every year beginning on the first Thursday of the month of August (this year it will be August 6-9)

This sale is 654 miles long - from West Unity, Ohio to Gadsden, Alabama - along the highway 127 corridor.

One of the photos below shows a life-size figure of Darth Vadar - just the thing for your front entry hall.

Link

border="0" />

Franken declared winner giving Democrats filibuster proof Senate majority

Al Franken (pictured) was given a Senate victory in Minnesota giving the Democrats their magic 60-vote majority.

The Franken win in Minnesota is reminiscent of an election in the Pacific Northwest five years ago.

Remember the 2004 gubernatorial election in the state of Washington? That’s when Christine Gregoire was declared the winner after three recounts. She was behind in the first two recounts until additional ballots were mysteriously discovered in King County.

Al Franken has followed the same path in his Minnesota Senate race against Norm Coleman. After recounts that even produced ballots mysteriously found in the trunk of an election workers car. In on county there were more votes for Franken than registered voters in on the county.

Mr. Franken has managed to pull a “Gregoire” in Minnesota.

As Joseph Stalin once said - elections are not decided by the people who cast the ballots - elections are decided by the people who count the ballots.

One blogger suggested it may be appropriate for Al Franken to publicly thank ACORN for his win.

We reported on the Al Franken saga four times in the past. Two of those reports can be found here and here.

More on the Franken win here and here.

Meet Al Franken the new Minnesota Senator

(click on picture to enlarge)

Senator Al Franken, Democrat from Minnesota

Michael Jackson fan with Jacko figurine

Racket demolished during tennis tournament

Belgian Kristof Vliegen breaks his racket during a match against Croatian Ivan Ljubicic during the Monte-Carlo ATP Masters Tournament.

Do they ever get their socks clean after playing on a clay court?

Supreme Court overturns Obama’s nominee for Supreme Court!

Can’t you just hear conservatives saying, “there, take that Mr. Obama!”

The Supreme Court today narrowly ruled in favor of white firefighters in New Haven, Conn., who said they were denied promotions because of their race, reversing a decision by Judge Sonia Sotomayor (pictured) that had come to play a large role in the consideration of her nomination for the high court.

Above: firefighters react to SC decision.

The city had thrown out the results of a promotion test because no African Americans and only two Hispanics would have qualified for promotions. It said it feared a lawsuit from minorities under federal laws that said such "disparate impacts" on test results could be used to show discrimination.

In effect, the court was deciding when avoiding potential discrimination against one group amounted to actual discrimination against another.

Without leaning on affirmative action, Obama and his handlers could not possibly have selected Sonia Sotomayor as a Supreme Court nominee.

Her rulings are simplistic, some of them were reportedly only one or two sentences long. Her rulings were often not bound by case law but by what she thinks the law should say.

As with many other left-wing judges, she was prone to make law from the bench rather than interpret law.

The nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court is actually rather pathetic. By her won admission, Sotomayor didn't have the intellectual capacity to get into Law School without affirmative action.

Now, her nomination to the Supreme Court is a classic case of an affirmative action president nominating an affirmative action judge to serve on the highest court of the land.

Link

Bernard Madoff: stripped of stolen riches and given life in prison

An article at the link below reports:

Convicted Wall Street swindler Bernard Madoff (pictured) was sentenced to 150 years in prison Monday for a fraud so extensive that the judge said he needed to send a message to potential imitators and to victims who demanded harsh punishment.

Scattered applause and whoops broke out in the crowded Manhattan courtroom after U.S. District Judge Denny Chin issued the maximum sentence to the 71-year-old defendant.

The judge said a conservative estimate of the amount Madoff cost his victims is more than $13 billion.

Bernard Madoff owned several homes including a $6.5 million penthouse in a building on Manhattan’s Upper Eastside shown above.

Now he resides in this cell in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York awaiting transfer to a prison where he will spend the rest of his life.

Before sentencing, one victim said, “Life has been a living hell. It feels like the nightmare we can't wake from.”

Another said, “He stole from the rich. He stole from the poor. He stole from the in between. He has no values. He cheated his victims out of their money so he and his wife Ruth could live a life of luxury beyond belief,”

Link

Most think they are not old regardless of age

A survey by Pew Research Center found that most people say they feel younger than their calendar age.

The average age considered "old" by respondents was 68 -- but there were real differences in perception driven by the respondents' own ages:

More than half of those under 30 say the average person becomes old before 60.

Middle-aged respondents say it's closer to 70.

Those aged 65 and older say "old" is not until 75.

"What you find is the older people are, the more people push back the age that is old," says Russell Ward, a sociologist who focuses on aging at the University at Albany, State University of New York, and who was not involved in the survey. "It's more in your future. You're not there yet."

But isn’t it how a person feels that determines when a person thinks they are old?

We all know people who look and act much younger than their biological age.

I have often said (with tongue-in-cheek) that sometimes I feel much younger than my calendar years. Other times, however, I get the urge to ship a case of prune juice to the nearest nursing home along with a signed note saying, “hold for arrival.”

Seriously, the secret of aging is to stay young at heart no matter how old the rest of your body is.

Link

Countless Russians jobless as Putin closes casino’s

Vladimir Putin has decreed that every legal casino and slot-machine parlor in Russia will be shut down.

It will be one of the largest mass layoffs in recent Russian history.

Putin’s anti-vice plan will put hundreds of thousands of people out of work in the midst of a global economic crisis.

The Kremlin has offered the gambling industry only one option for survival: relocate to four regions in remote areas of Russia, as many as 4,000 miles from the capital.

The potential marketing slogans -- Come to the Las Vegas of Siberia! Have a Ball near the North Korean Border! -- may not sound inviting, but that is in part what the government envisions.

None of the four regions are prepared for the transfer, and no casino is expected to reopen for several years leaving the industry’s workers out on the street indefinitely.

Link