Strange & Stupid: Amusing News

Bennigan’s Restaurants Shut Down Nationwide
Customers showing up for lunch at Bennigan’s restaurants across the country yesterday found quite a surprise…all the corporate-owned locations had signs on display reading “closed for business.”

Bennigan’s Grill and Tavern closed all of its corporate-owned locations nationwide after filing for bankruptcy. That amounts to 160 locations, and about 10,000 employees are out of work. Independent franchises remain open for business as usual.

Some managers and some employees say they were called in the middle of the night. People got the calls at the stores, others were called at 1:00 in the morning at their homes. No one expected it.
The corporate-owned locations comprise about half the entire chain.

Starbucks to shut majority of its Australian stores
Starbucks said Tuesday it would shut most of its Australian stores within a week, having already taken the axe to hundreds of US outlets as an economic downturn bites.

The company said it would shut 61 “underperforming” stores from a total 84 in Australia because it was refocusing to concentrate on the major cities of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane and surrounding areas.

Schultz said in a statement the decision to shut the stores reflected problems specific to the country and did not reflect “the strong state of Starbucks business in countries outside of the United States.”

“There are no other international markets that need to be addressed in this manner,” he said.

Google may be in the dictionary, but Cuil is attempting to take the search giant head on. Cuil(”cool”) is a new search engine founded by ex-google engineers. They claim that they can index faster and more cheaply than their behemouth older step brother.

The difference? Cuilers claim that rather than searches focused on web links and traffic patterns, Cuil will analyze the context of each page and the concepts behind each user search request.

“Our significant breakthroughs in search technology have enabled us to index much more of the Internet, placing nearly the entire Web at the fingertips of every user,” Tom Costello, Cuil co-founder and chief executive, said in a statement.

Cuil was founded by a group of search pioneers, including Costello, who built a prototype of Web Fountain, IBM’s Web search analytics tool, and his wife, Anna Patterson, the architect of Google Inc’s massive TeraGoogle index of Web pages. Patterson also designed the search system for global corporate document storage company Recall, a unit of Australia’s Brambles Ltd.

Editor, the Record:

I would like to know why none of our local grocery stores in Stroudsburg carry my favorite frozen potatoes. When I asked about them, I was told at the store they could not get them.

Only one local store carries this item. I had to go out of town for an appointment and stopped at a supermarket in Wind Gap and was able to get this product.

Why do people here have to shop out of town to get things they want?

If the stores want you to shop locally, then they should carry items people want. This doesn’t include the family-owned stores.

WALDRON H. SMITH

Stroudsburg

Today is National Sleepy Head Day in Naantali, Finland. Traditionally on this day the last person in the house still sleeping is woken up using water, either by being thrown into a lake or the sea or by having water thrown on them.

[This day is based on the story of the Seven Sleepers, the Saints of Ephesus who slept in a cave for some two to three hundred years during the Middle Ages to avoid persecution by Decius, the Roman emperor at the time. The story of the Seven Sleepers is told in the Quran and other Muslim texts.]

Would-be revellers are using satellite images on the internet to find houses with swimming pools - and then turning up uninvited for an impromptu dip.

The craze involves using the Google Earth programme, which provides high-quality aerial photos of Britain and other countries.

Once a target is chosen, the organisers use social networking sites such as Facebook and Bebo to arrange to meet, say police.

Officers said that residents have woken up to find youngsters ‘dipping’ in their back gardens, or have come home from work to a swimming pool full of beer cans.

One group has already boasted on the internet that it held an event earlier this week. Sixteen people are said to have gatecrashed two pools near Bournemouth.

The rules of ‘dipping’ often include wearing fancy dress and participants are urged to ‘bring a bike’ to escape if discovered.

There are fears that the craze could spread across the UK as the weather improves and pool owners leave their homes unattended while on holiday.

A spokesman for Devon and Cornwall Police said yesterday: ‘We are advising owners of swimming pools to be on their guard.

‘We would also warn prospective swimmers that using someone else’s pool is trespassing and therefore illegal.’

SANFORD, Fla. — A gang of female bandits dressed in nursing costumes is stalking and targeting women and elderly shoppers at Central Florida businesses.

Investigators said the band of women has been active in several communities, with the latest attack happening at a Sanford Wal-Mart located on 17-92.

In the most recent case, a 74-year-old woman was leaving a store and a group of women were spotted following her. One of the women then grabbed the victim’s purse and jumped into a silver four-door car.

“These women have been striking in Altamonte Springs and in Orlando,” Sanford police Jeffery Sabounji said. “They target elderly people and other females. They even dressed up as nurses to get people to relax so they think they are not going to do anything.”

Investigators said several women are involved in the theft ring but they are looking for one specific woman. She is a heavy-set woman with very short hair and can be mistaken for a man, detectives said.

Officers also said the woman is around 21 years old and apparently lives in Sanford.

Gyula Szabó from the University of Szeged [Hungary] is the lead author of the study, which was published in the July edition of Icarus. He explains, “There are several hundred thousand asteroids in our solar system. They orbit the sun, but because they are small their surface gravity is low. This means that many have strange, irregular shapes.”

The most accurate data about asteroids comes from spacecraft fly-bys, but only a few asteroids have been examined that way. Radar observations can only be made of objects that get close to the Earth. Telescopes produce detailed images, but only for the largest asteroids.

Another option for obtaining information about asteroids is called “time-resolved photometry.” The technique is surprisingly simple: By observing asteroids as they spin in space and then studying the amount of light reflected, scientists can get an idea of their shape. Getting accurate results from this method can take a long time, but the researchers realised that digital sky surveys could speed up the process. Such projects study thousands of objects every night. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey, for instance, mainly looks at stars and galaxies, but it also has gathered data on asteroids.

“This procedure was very economical,” says Gyula. “Using photometry, astronomers have determined shapes for about 1,200 asteroids in the past 30 to 40 years. We derived the shapes for ten times more asteroids, but in half an hour!”

“The results were really surprising,” says Gyula. “We saw there were families that included many elongated asteroids, and there were other ones which consisted of mostly spheroidal bodies.”

But what changes the asteroids’ shape? Gyula and his team have shown that asteroids change shape from elongated to roughly spherical due to being impacted during their lifetimes. They are like pebbles on the beach that become worn smooth over many years — only in space, erosion is caused by small impacts as rocks knock into each other and chip pieces off.

Voyager 2’s journey toward interstellar space has revealed surprising insights into the energy and magnetic forces at the solar system’s outer edge, and confirmed the solar system’s squashed shape.

Both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 continue to send data to Earth more than 30 years after they first launched. During the 1990s, Voyager 1 became the farthest manmade object in space.

Each spacecraft has now crossed the edge of the solar system, known as termination shock, where the outbound solar wind collides with inbound energetic particles from interstellar space. The termination shock surrounds the solar system and encloses a bubble called the heliosphere.

“The solar wind is blowing outward trying to inflate this bubble, and the pressure from interstellar wind is coming in,” said Edward Stone, physicist and Voyager project scientist at Caltech in Pasadena, Calif. He and other researchers published a series of studies in the journal Nature this week that detail the Voyager findings.

Voyager 2 reached the southern edge of the solar system 7.8 billion miles (84 AU) from the sun, closer than Voyager 1 which had reached the northern edge 8.7 billion miles (94 AU) from the sun. That confirms earlier suspicions about the heliosphere bubble being squashed at its southern region.

The reason for that asymmetrical shape rests with an interstellar magnetic field that puts more pressure on the southern region of the solar system — something that may change over 100,000 years as that magnetic field experiences turbulence, Stone said.

“We’re actually seeing the shock for the first time,” said John Richardson, principal scientist for Voyager’s Plasma Physics instrument at MIT in Cambridge, Mass.

An added mystery remains as to why the solar wind slows down early, as though anticipating running headlong into the termination shock. Researchers have begun looking into whether the solar wind somehow sheds energy ahead of time.

“Somehow the solar wind knows the shock is coming before it gets there, and theory says that shouldn’t be,” Richardson noted, adding that the solar wind speed drops from its supersonic speed of about 248 miles per second (400 km/s) to 186 miles per second (300 km/s) even before hitting the edge of the solar system. That speed falls more noticeably to about 93 miles per second (150 km/s) after the termination shock.

New Yorker - Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to 400 million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership.

Clandestine operations against Iran are not new. United States Special Operations Forces have been conducting cross-border operations from southern Iraq, with Presidential authorization, since last year. These have included seizing members of Al Quds, the commando arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and taking them to Iraq for interrogation, and the pursuit of “high-value targets” in the President’s war on terror, who may be captured or killed. But the scale and the scope of the operations in Iran, which involve the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), have now been significantly expanded, according to the current and former officials. Many of these activities are not specified in the new Finding, and some congressional leaders have had serious questions about their nature.

Under federal law, a Presidential Finding, which is highly classified, must be issued when a covert intelligence operation gets under way and, at a minimum, must be made known to Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and the Senate and to the ranking members of their respective intelligence committees—the so-called Gang of Eight. Money for the operation can then be reprogrammed from previous appropriations, as needed, by the relevant congressional committees, which also can be briefed.

“The Finding was focussed on undermining Iran’s nuclear ambitions and trying to undermine the government through regime change,” a person familiar with its contents said, and involved “working with opposition groups and passing money.” The Finding provided for a whole new range of activities in southern Iran and in the areas, in the east, where Baluchi political opposition is strong, he said.

Some members of the Democratic leadership were willing, in secret, to go along with the Administration in expanding covert activities directed at Iran, while the Party’s presumptive candidate for President, Barack Obama, has said that he favors direct talks and diplomacy.

The request for funding came in the same period in which the Administration was coming to terms with a National Intelligence Estimate, released in December, that concluded that Iran had halted its work on nuclear weapons in 2003. The Administration downplayed the significance of the N.I.E., and, while saying that it was committed to diplomacy, continued to emphasize that urgent action was essential to counter the Iranian nuclear threat. President Bush questioned the N.I.E.’s conclusions, and senior national-security officials, including Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, made similar statements. (So did Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican Presidential nominee.)
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SEATTLE (AP) - critical mass. critical breakdown.

A mob of bicyclists riding in Seattle with the monthly Critical Mass demonstration injured a motorist after an altercation.

Seattle Police spokesman Mark Jamieson says that on Friday between 100 and 300 bicyclists were riding down a street in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, blocking traffic on both lanes, when a man and a woman in a Subaru station wagon tried to pull out of a parking spot.

But some of the bicyclists blocked them, sat on the car and began banging on the vehicle. Words were exchanged between the male driver and the bicyclists.

The driver feared being assaulted and backed up, but bumped a biker and enraged the group. In response, some of the bikers smashed the windshield and rear window. He tried to drive away but hit another bicyclist.

The car stopped a block down and the bicyclists surrounded the car. One biker punched the driver through an open window and another used a knife to slash the tires.

When the driver got out of the car a male suspect struck him with an unknown object in the back of the head. The driver was later taken to the hospital. His female companion was not injured.

According to the Critical Mass web site, every month, bicyclists ride to promote bicycle use and assert cyclists’ right to the road among many reasons.