The Nightly Quill

Ask just about anyone in law enforcement, and they’ll tell you to be careful if you ever brew coffee in a hotel room.

“I know enough now that whenever I go to a hotel, regardless of how nice it is, I’ll never use a coffee pot,” said Marshall County District Attorney Steve Marshall.

Instead of brewing coffee, coffee pots are sometimes used to brew methamphetamine. And since meth labs in hotels aren’t anything new, Rick Phillips of the Marshall County Drug Enforcement Unit says there’s definitely a risk.

“The coffee makers that you find in every motel room is an ideal heat source. They mix it up in the coffee pot, put it on a heat source and let it sit there and cook,” said Phillips. It’s common knowledge to those who fight meth, but a shock to your average citizen. “That’s a little nerve rattling,” said Marshall County resident Toni Jones.

“I didn’t know that. Proud you told me,” said Marshall County resident Daryl Rice. If you were to drink coffee from a pot used to make meth, it could be hazardous to your health. The problem is residue from chemicals such as red phosphorus and iodine.
“Typical sickness and issues that would come with any chemical exposure, simple nausea, vomiting to maybe a hospital visit,” said Phillips. Phillips says it’s pretty easy to tell if a coffee pot has been used to cook meth. It will have a dark reddish-orange stain. You should also be skeptical if there’s a chemical odor when you walk in the room.
Link – www.waff.com

Here we see Steve Jobs delivering his commencement speech to the graduates of Stanford University in 2005. In it he talks about getting fired from Apple in 1985 and life & death. Fantastic in its simplicity.

Frank Zappa on CNN’s Crossfire in 1986. Discussing copyright and censorship.

Cheese lovers can now watch cheddar mature 24 hours a day on the internet.

West country farmers set up the Cheddarvision website featuring a 25 kg block of cheddar, reports ITN.

Farmer Tom Calver said: “How many other cheeses do you know of on the internet that have their own webcam and a live feed to the internet? I don’t think many.”

The highlight of the day on www.cheddarvision.tv is at around 10am when the cheese at the Somerset dairy is turned.

Watch Now !!>>>http://www.cheddarvision.tv/

The Nightly Quill finds a unique way for women to recover keys they forgot in a locked car.

On Oct. 12, in the basement of a Unitarian church on the town green in Lexington, Mass., a carpenter named Michael Cresta scored 830 points in a game of Scrabble. His opponent, Wayne Yorra, who works at a supermarket deli counter, totaled 490 points. The two men set three records for sanctioned Scrabble in North America: the most points in a game by one player (830), the most total points in a game (1,320), and the most points on a single turn (365, for Cresta’s play of QUIXOTRY).

In the community of competitive Scrabble, the game has been heralded as the anagrammatic equivalent of Wilt Chamberlain’s 100-point game in 1962 or Don Larsen’s perfect game in the 1956 World Series: a remarkable, wildly aberrational event with potential staying power. Cresta’s 830 shattered a 13-year-old record, 770 points, which had been threatened only infrequently. Read the rest of this entry »

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Don’t play pool with these guys.

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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.

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Many organizations including the cell phone industry often downplay the risk of cell phone radiation to the brain. Results from short-term studies were used to convince consumers that use of a cell phone is not associated with brain tumors or cancer, which only develop decades after exposure.To be fair, no one knows exactly how much harm a cell phone can do to a person. Recently, there was a study showing that radiation from a cell phone is so full of energy they can be used to cook eggs.

Vladimir Lagovski and Andrei Moiseynko from Komsomolskaya Pravda Newspaper in Moscow decided to learn first-hand how harmful cell phones are. There is no magic in cooking with your cell phone. The secret is in the radio waves that the cell phone radiates.

The journalists created a simple microwave structure as shown in the picture. They called from one cell phone to the other and left both phones on talking mode. They placed a tape recorder next to phones to imitate sounds of speaking so the phones would stay on.

In the experiment, researchers placed one egg in a porcelain cup (because it is easy to conduct heat), and put one cell phone on one side and another cell phone on the other. The researchers then called from one cell phone to another and kept the cell phones on after connecting.

During the first 15 minutes, nothing changed. After 25 minutes, however, the egg shell started to become hot and at 40 minutes, the surface of the egg became hard and bristled. Researchers found the protein in the egg had become solid although the egg yolk was still in liquid form. After 65 minutes, the whole egg was well cooked.

Does this study prove how scary cell phone radiation can be? People should draw their own conclusions. Although, so far no one has proved that radiation from cell phones can cause something clinically significant. By the same token, there has been no one who can disprove the existence of such a risk.

After 15 minutes: The egg became slightly warm.

25 minutes: The egg became very warm.

40 minutes: The egg became very hot.

65 minutes: The egg was cooked. (As you can see.)

Feast your eyes on the largest gold nugget on public display in the world.

Imagine finding this treasure with a metal detector. The Hand of Faith was discovered just so. Kevin Hillier found this only six inches below the surface standing in a vertical position, on October of 1980. Weighing 875 troy ounces (roughly 61 pounds and 11 ounces), the stone was uncovered from Wedderburn, Victoria, Australia and is now on display in The Golden Nugget casino in Las Vegas.

Norman Larsen, president and head chemist at the Rocket Chemical Company, developed a water displacement formula on his fortieth try, naming it WD-40.

The aerospace industry needed a product to eliminate moisture from electrical circuitry and to prevent corrosion on airplanes and Atlas Missile nose-cones. The newly developed WD-40 worked so well, engineers working at the Rocket Chemical Company began sneaking it out of the plant for home use on squeaky doors and stuck locks.

WD-40 became available to the public in 1958, and in 1961, a sweet fragrance was added to overcome the smell of the petroleum distillates. In 1969, the Rocket Chemical Company was renamed the WD-40 Company, after its only product. The WD-40 Company makes the “secret sauce,” then sends it to packagers who add the solvent and propellant.

In 1964, John Glenn circled the earth in Friendship VII, which was covered with WD-40 from top to bottom.

The WD-40 Company went public on the NASDAQ exchange in 1973. The initial 300,000 shares, available at $16.50, closed that same day at $26.50.

WD-40 makes over a million gallons of the “secret sauce” every year.

WD-40 can be found in four out of five American homes.

The Nightly Quill offers this video, not to stir up controversy, but rather to present Mr. Dawkins point of view. Feel free to comment with your opinion.
Part 1 :

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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 »

What On Earth Is Going On Here?

It’s all a miracle, when you come to think of it. All of it.

Billions of years ago, out of nothing, a universe evolved from a sound. The vibration of this “big bang” still continues to expand.

A planet evolved out of the masses of dead planets that would support life. As far as we currently know, no other planet in our galaxy supports life. There are rumors of space visitors but few of us have ever seen them, or their magnificent ships. It’s all hearsay, and since pictures can be doctored and governments tend to suppress things in a reflexive way, the more we think about it, the more confused we get.

Millions of creatures on this planet; some of them in the deepest recesses of the ocean; some alive in the depths of the soil; some flying in the air; some leaping across the tree tops; some slithering down the rocks; and then, of course, there’s us, living in concrete jungles, a species so intelligent that our closest biological parallel, the monkey, has the intelligence similar to that of a three-year-old human being.

We not only have an awareness of what is going on in our neighborhood but we have some pretty good ideas of what the rest of the galaxy looks like, as well as the universe as a whole. We have also developed enough mathematics and instruments to show us the smallest of things, a subatomic particle. To our surprise, we have found that it isn’t a thing at all, but a cloud of energy, a probability pattern that appears to dance in and out of existence and may even travel back and forth in time.

Where did all these creatures, so many, so spectacular, and so astonishing at times, come from, and why are they here anyway? What, for example, is the destiny of a rat? an earthworm? a culture of bacteria? Do they have a higher purpose, too, or are they just here to breed, consume, excrete, and die?

But it gets stranger still.

Biologically, you had a high probability of not being here in the first place. Read the rest of this entry »