The Nightly Quill

A group of people led by Rodney Cluff are planning a ship’s voyage to the North Pole, where they believe there’s a hole that leads to a paradisaical civilization inside the earth. And you’re invited to journey there with them…

BOSTON -  Police are looking for a man who robbed the Citizen’s Bank on Elm Street in Manchester, New Hampshire on Saturday disguised as a tree!

The man walked into the bank with tree branches duct taped on his arms and demanded money from the teller. The teller filled the bag with cash and the suspect took off.  A dye pack inside the bag exploded.

Manchester Police describe the man as a white male, between 45 and 50 years old, wearing glasses and a blue shirt.

Former Saturday Night Live star Tony Rosato has languished behind bars for two years with no trial.

He started out as a gifted improv comic at Toronto’s Second City. From there, Tony Rosato took his zany writing and performing style to the small screen, winning fame on SCTV and later on Saturday Night Live.

His off-the-wall characters ranged from fictional TV chef Marcello Sebastiano to Lou Costello, Captain Kangaroo and Yasser Arafat. Industry buzz pegged him as the next John Belushi.

Rosato went on to perform in a variety of TV shows and movies. In 1989 he was nominated for the best-supporting-actor Gemini for his role as police informant Whitey in Night Heat.

Then suddenly, two years ago, Rosato disappeared.

Since then, the actor has been behind bars, with no trial, at the maximum-security Quinte Detention Centre in Napanee, 30 kilometres west of Kingston, on charges of criminally harassing his wife during their marriage. It’s alleged that his “reckless” behaviour led his spouse, Leah, with whom he has a now-2-year-old daughter, to be afraid for her own safety or others’.

According to his Toronto lawyer, Daniel Brodsky, Rosato was arrested after repeatedly complaining to police that, in a scenario reminiscent of the film Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the actor’s wife and their infant daughter had gone missing, having been replaced by imposters.

The Italian-born, Toronto-based actor, now 53, has had a bail hearing and a preliminary inquiry. Both of them are subject to publication bans.

Arraignment documents show Rosato was denied bail almost three months after his arrest, after undergoing a mental fitness assessment.

He has never had a bail review, and his trial (by judge alone) isn’t scheduled until Nov. 13.

Rosato steadfastly maintains that he is sane, and innocent. “I’m not pleading guilty – I’m fighting injustice” has been his mantra in phone calls with show business friends. MORE>>> Read the rest of this entry »

Julie Amero, a substitute teacher at a middle school in Norwich, Conn., said she had simply wanted to e-mail her husband. The authorities contend that she was — purposely or, perhaps, carelessly — exposing 11- and 12-year-old students to pornography rather than teaching them English.

Last month, Ms. Amero was convicted in Norwich Superior Court of four counts of risking injury to a child and faces up to 40 years in prison at a sentencing hearing scheduled for March 2. She has insisted on her innocence, refusing to accept a plea bargain that would have allowed her to walk free. She portrays herself as a hapless technophobe too clueless to unplug a wayward computer.

Ms. Amero, 40, a longtime substitute, contends that when she arrived that day in October 2004, she asked the regular seventh-grade language arts teacher at Kelly Middle School if she could use his computer to e-mail her husband. But first, she says, she went to the bathroom, and when she returned, the teacher was gone and students were gathered around the screen, watching a hairstyle Web site.

When she tried to close the site, what she got was an endless barrage of pop-up ads for pornography sites. The images continued all day, since “I absolutely have no clue about computers,” she said in an interview.

Ms. Amero plans to appeal, and she says lawyers have offered to handle the appeal free. Read the rest of this entry »

A champion paraglider described today her terror at being flung to a height greater than Mount Everest by a tornado-like thunderstorm in Australia.

Ewa Wisnerska, 35, was sucked so high that she blacked out and became encased in ice.

“You can’t imagine the power. You feel like nothing, like a leaf from a tree going up,” she told Australian radio.

Wisnerska, from Germany, was preparing for the 10th World Paragliding Championships above the town of Manilla in New South Wales when the storm struck on Wednesday.

With terrifying speed she was whisked from 2,500 ft to an estimated 32,000 ft in about 15 minutes.

A 42-year-old Chinese paraglider, He Zhongpin, was also caught in the storm and died, apparently from a lack of oxygen and extreme cold.

His body was found nearly 50 miles from where he had taken off. Wisnerska said she encountered hailstones the size of oranges as the temperature dropped to minus 58 degrees fahrenheit.

“I was shaking all the time. The last thing I remember it was dark. I could hear lightning all around me,” she said.

Her ordeal was recorded by global positioning and a radio attached to her equipment.

When her desperate attempts to skirt the powerful thunderstorm failed, she concluded that her chances of survival were “almost zero.” “I said, ‘I can’t do anything. It’s raining and hailing and I’m still climbing — I’m lost.”’

The paragliding 2005 World Cup winner lost consciousness for more than 30 minutes while her aircraft flew on uncontrolled, sinking and lifting several times.

“There’s no oxygen. She could have suffered brain damage. But she came to again at a height of 6,900 metres with ice all over her body and slowly descended herself,” said Godfrey Wenness, the event organizer and one of Australia’s most experienced paraglider pilots.

After regaining consciousness, she felt like an astronaut returning from the Moon as the ground loomed beneath her. “I could see the Earth coming — wow, like Apollo 13 — I can see the Earth,” she said.

Wisnerska landed safely 40 miles from her original launch site with ice in her lightweight flying suit and frost bite to her face.

She spent just an hour in a hospital for observation and hopes to compete in biennial championships which begin on February 24.

Earlier this month a British paraglider survived an attack by two large eagles while flying in the same area.

Sued Michael Jordan, because he looks like him:
Allen Heckard sued Michael Jordan and Phil Knight on July 2006. Heckard claims he has suffered emotional trauma because he looks like Michael Jordan. Heckard has filed his look-alike case at the Washington County Court in Oregon and with a $832 million dollar head. Allen Heckard believes his life has been rough since people continually think he is Michael Jordan. Heckard says when he plays basketball, people are constantly telling him he plays like Michael Jordan and this has been difficult for him. Heckard is only six feet tall, so obviously those who assume he is Michael Jordan have little regard for height. Heckard even wears Air Jordan shoes, he says that they’re the most comfortable.

Sued after getting stuck on the house he was robbing:
In October 1998, A Terrence Dickson of Bristol Pennsylvania was exiting a house he finished robbing by way of the garage. He was not able to get the garage door to go up, because the automatic door opener was malfunctioning. He couldn’t re- enter the house because the door connecting the house and garage locked when he pulled it shut. The family was on vacation, so Mr. Dickson found himself locked in the garage for eight days. He subsisted on a case of Pepsi he found, and a large bag of dry dog food. This upset Mr. Dickson, so he sued the homeowner’s insurance claiming the situation caused him undue mental anguish. The jury agreed to the tune of half a million dollars and change. Read the rest of this entry »

Stevie demonstrates a remarkably bizarre talent. He is nicknamed: “The Human Regurgitator”

A maggot couldn’t ask for a better friend than Rebecca O’Flaherty. She helps kids appreciate the larval stage of flies, teaching children how to dip maggots into nontoxic paint and set them on paper to writhe away, creating “maggot art.”

She teaches law enforcement officers how to recognize, collect and preserve maggots and other insect evidence that can help establish time of death.

And she’s devoted years of her life to studying maggot habits, working toward a doctorate in entomology at UC Davis.

O’Flaherty wants people to better understand the insects that tidy up the world’s oozing messes.

“We’d be knee-deep in garbage … if we didn’t have them to clean it up,” she said.

Maggot art is the hook, and it’s a grabber. A piece of O’Flaherty’s art has been part of the scenery on “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,” hanging on the office wall of fictional TV investigator Gil Grissom. In Sacramento, O’Flaherty and two friends just opened a maggot art exhibit at the Capital Athletic Club, where their work’s squiggling, swooping lines decorate a hallway gallery that leads to the swimming pool.

Beyond the art are more serious goals: Help forensic entomology shed its academic image of too much flash, too little substance. Help answer some of the questions that are vitally important to detective work, such as how temperature affects maggot growth.

Read the rest of this entry »

This is a list of unusual deaths – unique causes or extremely rare circumstances – recorded throughout history. The list also includes less rare, but still unusual, deaths of prominent persons.

1. 1911: Jack Daniel, founder of the Tennessee whiskey distillery, died of blood poisoning six years after receiving a toe injury when he kicked his safe in anger at being unable to remember its combination code.

2. 1916: Grigori Rasputin, Russian mystic, died of drowning while trapped under ice. Although the details of his murder are disputed, he was allegedly placed in the water through a hole in the winter ice after having been poisoned, bludgeoned and shot multiple times in the head, lung, and liver.

3. 1920 : Baseball player Ray Chapman was killed when he was hit in the head by a pitch. He remains the only Major League Baseball player to date to have been killed in a game.

4. 1927: J.G. Parry-Thomas, a British racing driver, was decapitated by his car’s drive chain which, under duress, snapped and whipped into the cockpit. He was attempting to break his own Land speed record which he had set the previous year. Despite being killed in the attempt, he succeeded in setting a new record of 171 mph.

5. 1927: Isadora Duncan, dancer, died of accidental strangulation and broken neck when her scarf caught on the wheel of a car in which she was a passenger.

6. 1928: Alexander Bogdanov, a Russian physician, died following one of his experiments, in which the blood of a student suffering from malaria and tuberculosis, L. I. Koldomasov, was given to him in a transfusion.

7. 1933: Michael Malloy, a homeless man, was murdered by gassing after surviving multiple poisonings, intentional exposure, and being struck by a car. Malloy was murdered by five men in a plot to collect on life insurance policies they’d purchased.

8. 1935: Baseball player Len Koenecke was bludgeoned to death with a fire extinguisher by the crew of an aircraft he had chartered, after provoking a fight with the pilot while the plane was in the air.

9. 1941: Sherwood Anderson, writer, swallowed a toothpick at a party and then died of peritonitis.

10. 1943: Lady be Good, a USAAF B-24 bomber lost its way and crash landed in the Libyan Desert. Mummified remains of its crew, who struggled for a week without water, were not found until 1960. Read the rest of this entry »

Will this ever get published?? Stay tuned…….

Deceased Author Writes From Beyond the Grave

Ruth Montgomery Writes Again

HANOVER, NH – Good Against Evil = Love Versus Fear is the title of a new book that is being written by a New England family, the Macombers, about the messages they say they have been receiving for the past three-and-one-half years from the late Ruth Montgomery, award-winning journalist and noted author of numerous books on psychic phenomena.

Less than a year after she died on June 10, 2001, Mrs. Montgomery made contact with the living from behind death’s door, according to Rob Macomber, the family member drafting the manuscript. Macomber explains that, using the same process of automatic writing through which she had received knowledge from Spirit Guides on “The Other Side” for much of her writings, Ruth Montgomery, one-time “First Lady of the Psychic World,” began communications with the Macombers, a family who had never met her when she was alive.

As Macomber describes it, Ruth Montgomery said that she had joined these Spirit Guides – including her close friend, the famed medium, Arthur Ford – in Heaven and explained that the human race was at a critical juncture. Macomber said that Ruth explained how, together with these Guides, she would be providing information to the Macomber family – more than one of them – that was to be used to write a book that would spell out how humanity can save itself from self-destruction.

The result of Ruth Montgomery and the Spirit Guides’ communications with the Macombers is that they have formed a small, family-run company called “Distinctive Publications for the World” that is putting out the upcoming title, Good Against Evil = Love Versus Fear. The book will include:

- A 3-part action plan that provides solutions to the planet’s greatest troubles.

- How the Spirit Guides let it be known that 50% of the book’s profits should be donated to help address the world’s single most pressing problem. Read the rest of this entry »

Scientists have unearthed the fossil of a young, two-headed marine reptile that lived when dinosaurs still walked the Earth.

“My first reaction when I saw that fossil was of the ‘Oh my God!’ type,” said lead researcher Eric Buffetaut of the Center for National Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris, France. “It’s something you would not really expect to see, because the chances of such a freak being fossilized are so slim.”

The discovery, detailed in of the Feb. 22 issue of the journal Biology Letters, marks the earliest known occurrence of a well-known birth defect, called axial bifurcation, in living reptiles. This double-noggin phenomenon occurs when an embryo is damaged and some body parts develop twice.

Buffetaut and his colleagues uncovered the remains [image] in the Yixian Formation in northeastern China, a rich fossil deposit famous for its treasure trove of feathered dinosaur and early bird remains. The creature, called Hyphalosaurus lingyuanensis, died at a young age during the Cretaceous period 120 million years ago, during the twilight of the dinosaur’s reign.

While a reptile, Hyphalosaurus was not a dinosaur. Instead, it belonged to a diverse group of primitive aquatic and semi-aquatic creatures called choristoderes. Some choristoderes looked like lizards or crocodiles, while others resembled miniature versions of plesiosaurs, ancient marine reptiles with barrel-shaped bodies, short tails, paddle-like limbs and, in some cases, long serpentine necks–somewhat like the mythical Loch Ness monster.

Hyphalosaurus belonged to this last class of choristoderes. While the two-headed fossil was just over three inches long, an adult Hyphalosaurus could grow up to three feet in length and would have looked like a baby Nessie [image].

“But the limbs were not flipper-like as in plesiosaurs,” Buffetaut said. “They were similar to lizard limbs.”

How the creature died is unclear. “It seems to have been a hatchling, and perhaps it was still-born,” Buffetaut told LiveScience. “In any case it didn’t live long.”

The new baby Hyphalosaurus specimen not only had two heads; it also had two necks. While rare, this kind of malformation is well known among modern-day reptiles, including lizards, snakes, turtles and tortoises.

Two-headed mammals, including sheep, calves and kittens, are also known but these animals don’t typically live as long.

“Two-headed reptiles manage to survive for some time, probably because they have less complex brains and behaviors than birds or mammals,” Buffetaut said.

More here: Read the rest of this entry »