A majority of the M/C crashes that I see are a combination of Asshativeness, Squidlyness and Dumbassification. Occasionally ETOH is tossed in, but rarely, and when it is, bleach is in order as well as the medical examiner.
A tiny colony of yeast trapped inside a Lebanese weevil covered in ancient Burmese amber for up to 45 million years, has been brought back to life in barrels of beer.
Emeritus Professor Raul Cano of the California Polytechnic State University, originally extracted the yeast a decade ago, along with more than 2000 different kinds of microscopic creatures.
Today, Cano uses the reactivated yeast to brew barrels of pale ale and German wheat beer.
"You can always buy brewing yeast, and your product will be based on the brewmaster's recipes," says Cano. "Our yeast has a double angle: We have yeast no one else has and our own beer recipes."
The beer received good reviews at the Russian River Beer Festival and from other reviewers. The Oakland Tribune beer critic, William Brand, said the beer has "a weird spiciness at the finish," and The Washington Post said the beer was "smooth and spicy."
Part of that taste comes from the yeast's unique metabolism. "The ancient yeast is restricted to a narrow band of carbohydrates, unlike more modern yeasts, which can consume just about any kind of sugar," says Cano.
Eventually the yeast will likely evolve the ability to eat other sugars, which could change the taste of the beer. Cano plans to keep a batch of the original yeast to keep the beer true to form.
If this has a ring of deja vu, it could be because Cano's amber-drilling technique is the same one popularised in the movie Jurassic Park, where scientists extracted ancient dinosaur DNA from the bellies of blood-sucking insects trapped in fossilised tree sap.
Cano's original goal was to find ancient microscopic creatures that might have some kind of medical value, particularly pharmaceutical drugs.
People in Central America were drinking beverages made from cacao before 1000 BC, hundreds of years earlier than once thought, a new study shows.
These early cacao beverages were probably alcoholic brews, or beers, made from the fermented pulp of the cacao fruit.
These beverages were around 500 years earlier than the frothy chocolate-flavored drink made from the seed of the cacao tree that was such an important feature of later Mesoamerican culture.
But in brewing this primitive beer, or chicha, the ancient Mesoamericans may have stumbled on the secret to making chocolate-flavoured drinks, the paper says.
"In the course of beer brewing, you discover that if you ferment the seeds of the plant you get this chocolate taste," says John Henderson, a professor of anthropology at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and lead author of the paper.
"It may be that the roots of the modern chocolate industry can be traced back to this primitive fermented drink."
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed [and hence clamorous to be led to safety] by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
We are entering a new world, the landscape of which is still shrouded in mist.
Its most obvious characteristic is that both states and peoples will have less to spend.
For years ahead, outside the oil-producing countries and gangster cultures such as that of Russia, conspicuous consumption will become unfashionable.
Just as the heady, decadent Twenties gave way to the much more sober and austere Thirties following the Crash of 1929, so in the next decade we are likely to see less champagne drunk, fewer yachts launched, the eclipse of in-yer-face extravagance.
People who make real things, as distinct from mere money, and do real jobs as distinct from manipulating idiot financial-instruments, should regain some of the respect which they lost in the Age of Greed.
Government spending will be drastically curbed. The Exchequer will lack tax revenues or borrowing capacity to pay an army of political correctness enforcers, to fund the bloated benefits system and grandiose public works.
Much of this will seem welcome to ordinary people. For years, they have recoiled - and not out of envy or meanness - from the excesses of Wall Street, the City and the Exchequer. They instinctively understood that surfing upon oceans of cash was as corrupting as drug addiction or over-eating
We have become a morally obese society. Now it is diet time, with a vengeance.
Unfortunately, however, and as I suggested here a fortnight ago, neither in Britain nor in the U.S. can we allow ourselves the luxury of revenge upon the pretty horrible and incompetent people who have got us into this mess.
It is vital that the financial system should recover from this shambles, that Wall Street and the City should once more play a dominant part in the affairs of the world.
If primacy in this field passes to Asia, as our manufacturing has already done, then our future in the 21st century will look bleak indeed.
Delicious as it would be to see some bankers swinging gently in the autumn breeze from lampposts outside their offices, we cannot afford that indulgence.
We should pray that the U.S. Congress thinks better of its impulse on Monday, prompted by the fury of the American people, who wanted to leave the bankers to face the consequences of their great failure. If they go down, we go with them.
To recall Kipling's words after the Boer War, we have had no end of a lesson. The hubris of Anglo-American capitalism has been brought low in a fashion which even three months ago would have seemed unimaginable.
All of us are going to lose money - the only question is how much. Some of us are going to forfeit jobs and homes - the only uncertainty concerns how many.
Just whisper the word 'wine' and most of us will start dreaming about a glass of full-bodied red or a chilled, crisp white.
In goes the corkscrew, and out, slowly, comes the cork with a deeply satisfying 'pop'.
Well, stop dreaming right now.
We'll come to the details of why you've already made your first mistake by choosing a bottle sealed with a cork in a moment.
First, I have to tell you some broader home truths about the world of wine.
Because it's not the world of refined elegance and gentle self-indulgence that you probably imagine.
Instead, it's populated by liars, scroungers and cheats, administered by charlatans and snake-oil salesman and run on a system of misrepresentation and ritualised fraud.
It's a world that still deliberately surrounds itself in impenetrable, pretentious and often plain misleading wine-speak, churned out by snobby writers and duplicitous merchants who delight in the obscure and the shadowy, the indistinct and the imprecise.
Often the relationship between producer and supposedly impartial writer turns out to be so close they could accurately be described as twin cheeks of the same backside.
And yet it is from these often self-serving writers that we are supposed to take our wine-buying advice.
In pursuit of metaphors ever more elaborate, one particularly pretentious critic once described a bottle of Palo Cortado as a 'strange hermaphrodite sherry', a description so bizarre that any reader would be left utterly baffled instead of enlightened - and certainly not encouraged to try this genuinely delicious sherry.
At least when I once described a wine as 'reminiscent of a sumo-wrestler's jockstrap', you got a pretty good idea that it probably wasn't worth buying.
Wine drinkers have been cowed into believing that wine is a subject so complex that you must pass an advanced course just to dip your toe into it.
They are being duped by an unholy alliance of producers, merchants, restaurateurs and wine writers who have thrown a veil of quasi-religious mystique over wine, that enables them to transform a pleasant drink into an almost holy rite - and to charge a small fortune for the pleasure.
How do I know all this? Because I've been drinking the stuff for the best part of 40 years and spent the past 20 as one of those wine writers.
I wrote a weekly wine column for The Guardian newspaper and authored Superplonk, the bestselling guide to supermarket wine.
Both jobs, I hasten to add, were back in the good old days, when supermarkets actually sold decent, good value wine - something of an rarity these days.
Throughout my wine column-writing career, I was really only interested in two things - taste and value for money.
Now, however, I have written what could easily be my last wine book.
The reason: because with the title of The Great Wine Swindle, I tell it like it really is - and the wine industry isn't going to like it one bit.
First, how many of you realise the true contents of that bottle you're so looking forward to this evening? Because it certainly isn't pure fermented grape juice.
Sugar may have been added to beef up the alcohol levels, while the juice from all sorts of grapes that aren't on the label could easily have found their way into the bottle.
Some will be from different varieties, a practice which depending on the degree of substitution may or may not be illegal; others may even be from entirely different regions; even countries.
The latter are called vins de medicin - typically, big beefy reds from hot regions mixed in to provide colour, weight and alcohol to otherwise sub-standard wines from Bordeaux and Burgundy.
Other fraudsters take a different approach. They re-label inferior wine from, say, the Languedoc and then pass it off as a highly-prized Bordeaux, such as a Margaux or Petrus, before exporting it, often to the Far East. It is estimated that 5 per cent of exported 'fine' wine may be fake.
The wine trade will tell you that this sort of thing doesn't happen now. But it does - and at every level.
Last year, I heard about a Moldovan pinot grigio - a wine made from one of the few grape varieties to be ordered by name and particularly fashionable among women drinkers - that was actually made from the distinctly less trendy sauvignon and traminer grapes.
A one-off? Not a chance. Only last summer, Off Licence News, a UK drinks trade publication, quoted Trading Standards Institute estimates that 'fake pinot grigio could account for as much as 30 per cent of wines in the retail sector'.
Misrepresentation and fraud are rife in the largely unpoliced international wine trade.
These days, you probably won't find anti-freeze in your bottle, as they famously did with certain Austrian wines in 1985, or in 1987, when methanol was added to some Italian wines and killed 23 people.
But the list of what you will find grows ever longer: oak powder, fruit flavourings, acids, cleaning agents, antioxidants, stabilisers.
The Australian Wine Research Institute's Analytical Service lists around 40 chemicals that are considered acceptable, including bentonite - an absorbent material, also used in cat litter, which helps remove excess protein from white wine.
By comparison, European regulations list over 60 (including three types of bentonite), while the official South African list runs to 76.
This is startling information for anyone who fondly imagined that you made wine merely by pressing grapes and letting nature do the rest.
I honestly wouldn't mind any of this if the wine tasted good, represented good value and there was an accurate list of ingredients on the label - incidentally, the Co-op is one of the few retailers committed to open and honest labelling.
But the Co-op stands alone. Wine, the establishment maintains, is too grand and romantic to carry anything as mundane as a list of ingredients.
Well, that's arrogant nonsense. Many wines are now no more natural than a sugary soft drink - and wineries should not be allowed to pretend that they are.
There are reasons why winemakers use this astonishing cocktail of chemicals. Wine, unlike many other products, is not uniform. It varies.
It changes from vineyard to vineyard, vintage to vintage, and over time. And the chemicals help them keep things predictable.
But what else do the vast majority of winemakers do with this unstable, unpredictable liquid?
They seal it with cork - a biological compound which is not only an ineffective seal against oxidisation, but has a whole range of unpredictable qualities of its own.
As a result, wine even varies from bottle to bottle.
The biggest problem, and a serial killer of good wine, is cork taint. This ruins one in ten bottles, literally decimating them.
Cork taint is caused by a chemical, 2-4-6 trichloranisole, which is inadvertently created by the chlorine cleaning that the tree bark undergoes before it becomes a wine seal.
It's responsible for the musty aroma that tells you instantly that a wine is corked - although any number of theatrically incredulous wine waiters will swear blind it isn't there.
Of course, there is an alternative to corks - although it's certainly not those infernal plastic corks that are so difficult to extract and well nigh impossible to put back.
No, the answer is the screwcap, an idea that still causes a sharp intake of disapproving breath among wine snobs. Why? Because we are told by the powers-that-be that wine is all about mystique and tradition, and that cork is a vital part of that romance.
But does a screwcap kill the romance of wine? Not if the fruit in the bottle is sexy; not, indeed, if it simply tastes as it's supposed to.
And, while we are slaying sacred cows, why does wine always have to come in the traditional 750ml bottle, a size that only exists because centuries ago that was what a glass-blower could blow with a single puff?
It would be better packaged in pints (in a Tetra Pak carton, say) or in a plastic pouch of two litres (for picnics and parties) or even an aluminium can. Only tradition and ritual maintain the idiocy of wine in glass bottles.
But one of the biggest nonsenses promulgated by the wine trade is the alleged importance of something called 'terroir', a French word used to describe the environment - an elusive combination of geology, geography and climate - in which the vines grow.
If the end-product was an edible fruit, a peach, say, the importance of terroir would be irrefutable - the combination of soil, slope and sun would obviously have a bearing on its quality and taste.
But we are not eating peaches, we are drinking wine, something produced, certainly from wine grapes, but only after they have been totally transformed by a complex biochemical process controlled not by nature, but by humankind.
But the 'terroirists' - the wine merchants, the producers, the toffee-nosed wine writers - want you to believe that despite all this human intervention and science, the wine will still reflect the vineyard where the grapes were grown. They say you can taste the landscape the grapes grew in.
Unfortunatley, this is rubbish. It is simply more jargon that wine writers and the high-end wine merchants they support can use to hoodwink their customers - you.
I'm not saying these so-called experts can't tell the difference between one wine and another (although an interesting scientific aside is that if you blindfold a group of seasoned wine-tasters, a significant proportion won't even be able to tell white from red).
But the difference they can taste is not down to terroir but to the difference between the individuals, the winemakers, who made the wines. Some do it one way, others another; some are outstanding, others are not.
Truly smart wine drinkers know there are only three things that really count - the grape variety, the year and, most importantly of all, the winemaker.
But terroir is part of a colossal con worked on the poor, misinformed, wine-drinking public.
Because the notion that one vineyard is better at producing wine than another leads to the idea - enshrined in official designations such as Appellation Controllee (AC) in France and Denominazione di Origine Controllata (DOC) in Italy - that certain regions produce better wines than others.
That's why we have been told that we are better off buying bottles that bear the initials AC or DOC. But this is nonsense, as anyone who has bought any one of umpteen highly disappointing Appellation Bordeaux Controlee wines will tell you.
It's good wine-makers that make good wines, not the fact that the world-famous Chateau Lafite winery is just down the road.
Even the Philippe de Rothschild company, famous for Bordeaux's grand cru Chateau Mouton Rothschild wine, now acknowledges this - as I discovered when I read the neck label of one of its subsidiary Chilean ventures...
'As in France, so it is in the New World, it is the winemaker who proves the inimitable finesse that distinguishes a Baron de Philippe Rothschild wine. This man, with a tongue like a tuning fork, tastes the cuvees (or parcels of wine) selects and, with infinite care, assembles them to produce beautifully balanced wines.'
Laugh? I cried. Apart from making the whole of the 1855 Bordeaux classification league, which is based on chateau site, irrelevant piffle, it is hugely entertaining to think of a winemaker with a forked tongue and his employer openly admitting it.
No, the only people who benefit from regional classifications, such as AC, are the vineyard owners whose properties become more valuable because they lie within its boundaries. And to maintain that value, they peddle the myth that their land is intrinsically special.
Nowhere is this more readily apparent than in the Champagne region. This year, to cope with booming demand for their over-rated, over-priced but magnificently well-branded product, it was decided that they should expand their AC area to include 40 villages previously outside the designated area.
Suddenly, former wheat fields jumped from being worth £4,000 [about US $7,200] a hectare to a staggering - and please hold your breath - £800,000 [about US $1.45 million] a hectare.
Small wonder then that I describe the notions of Appellation Controlee and terroir as real estate scams.
But the truth is the whole wine business is a con - and the only victim is you, the great, wine-drinking, myth-swallowing, duty-paying public.
Well, it's time to start fighting back. It's time to start demanding labels that tell us exactly what's gone into our evening tipple and screwcaps that ensure it reaches your glass in tip-top condition.
Then, it's time to forget all the flowery metaphors, the ridiculous snobbery and the terroir talk, and have faith in your own judgment.
So, the next time you're faced with some self-serving wine expert who bamboozles you with their jargon and doubtful knowledge, just repeat this little mantra: 'I know what you do not; I know what I like.'
Because, take it from me, the rest is just claptrap.
A week ago I was invited to attend the inauguration of a modern marvel of chronological invention, which was officially dedicated to the memory of the largely forgotten John Harrison. On a bright, sunlit autumnal evening, a sizeable crowd gathered on the corner of King's Parade and Benet Street in Cambridge to watch Stephen Hawking - appropriately, our greatest living theoretical exponent of time - unveil the "Corpus Clock", the brainchild of an Honorary Fellow of Corpus Christi College.
This extraordinary, entirely mechanical chronophage or "time-eater" has neither hands nor numerals to display the time. Instead, above a glittering two-metre diameter gold-plated disk, a huge, jaw-snapping, rolling-eyed mechanical grasshopper rocks back and forth, apparently munching successive notches of the revolving dials with every passing second.
Its movement triggers blue lights that dart across the clock face, registering the seconds and minutes as they pass. Each hour is signalled by a race of blue lights and the rattle of a chain dropping into an unseen coffin to remind passers-by of their mortality. Occasionally the pendulum hesitates to remind us that our perception of the march of time is subjective.
The clock's inventor said at the unveiling he "wanted to make timekeeping interesting", by turning the clock inside out "so you can see the seconds being eaten up" - literally by what is in fact a gigantic grasshopper escapement.
Standing modestly to one side during last week's ceremony was the man who invented and executed the clock. Unlike the author of A Brief History of Time, I can almost guarantee listeners have never heard of him. Yet Dr John C Taylor was introduced to the onlookers as "one of this country's greatest inventors" - and so he is.
The rather considerable fortune which has enabled John Taylor not only to provide the £1m the extraordinary clock eventually cost, but also the millions to turn the former bank building which houses it into a brand new undergraduate library for his old college (and I might add, educational bursaries including one held by a research student at my own institution), was accumulated as a result of a more humdrum invention, but one which is now so ubiquitous that we all of us depend on it.
It was he who perfected the kettle thermostat, the bimetallic strip which ensures our kettle switches off once it has boiled merrily for a few seconds, rather than boiling dry. This simple, elegant little invention is used globally in a wide variety of thermostatically controlled domestic electrical appliances. It is hard to imagine how we would do without it. Why, then, does his name not figure on honours boards across the British Isles?
Clocks are only one among a roll-call of instruments and appliances perfected by technical wizards over the centuries. Precision instruments are essential for testing the hypotheses of the very theoretical science which disparages the achievements of the inventors and technicians who designed and made them. No experimental science would be possible without clocks capable of measuring tiny increments of time.
Inventors like John Taylor turn the breakthroughs made by theoretical science into the applied benefits we see all around us. His company's website lists among their achievements not just corded and cordless kettles, but under-floor heating with a cordless connector and a new coating to make kettles boil less noisily.
Perhaps if our society were more ready to celebrate those who are ingenious, or "good with their hands", and produce the inventions that allow us to lead comfortable daily lives, we would all become genuinely interested in the science that underpins the kettle and the clock. Perhaps more of our children would then decide to make science their specialist study at school and university.
But in order for that to happen theoretical scientists in their laboratories and universities have themselves to be prepared to acknowledge the importance of engineers, inventors and technicians of all kinds, so that their achievements are celebrated as they deserve, and their names trip as easily off our tongues as those of Einstein and Newton.
A daring public relations stunt by a newly opened electronics store in Malmö left its long established competitor with empty shelves and its CEO seething.
“I didn’t know if I should laugh or cry,” said Anders Nilsen, CEO of the Elgiganten electronics chain, to the Dagens Media newspaper.
Nilsen was standing in front of a Malmö Elgiganten outlet to welcome customers interested in taking up the store’s offer of low priced flat screen televisions.
The sale was designed to coincide with the opening of the competing Media Markt electronics retailer's Malmö store.
But shortly after Elgiganten opened its doors, Nilsen watched in disbelief as a large truck pulled up and 20 people hopped out and started loading up the sale-priced televisions.
“I realized at once what was happening,” he told the newspaper.
“I was a little upset. They probably hadn’t assumed that I would be there. The guy in charge confirmed they were from Media Markt and then went to call headquarters.”
The stunt was a coup for the upstart Media Markt, which later sent an email to Nilsen confirming they had pulled the stunt.
INDIANAPOLIS -- A man who police said broke into a home with the intention of sexually assault a 17-year-old girl in her bedroom died early Sunday morning after a struggle with the girl's father.
David Meyers (pictured), 52, was pronounced dead at the scene shortly after officers arrived following a report of a home invasion in the 3500 block of West 79th Street at about 3:20 a.m.
Officers said they found Robert McNally, 64, on the floor with his arm around the neck of Meyers, struggling to hold him down.
When officers told McNally he could let go, they found that Meyers was unresponsive. Medics who were called to the scene then pronounced Meyers dead.
Indianapolis police Sgt. Matt Mount said Meyers had come into the home naked, except for a mask and latex gloves.
"He had rope, had a knife, had condoms, had a gag," Mount said.
. . .
The results of the police investigation will be turned over to the Marion County Prosecutor's Office, but it is unlikely charges will be filed, police said.
Number of allied casualties (er, stings): 0
Number of bees killed: est. 10,000
Number of bee survivors: about 25 or so
A patient treated for agonizing abdominal pain received this surprising news in the hospital's paperwork: "Based on your visit today, we know you are pregnant." Surprising indeed for 71-year-old John Grady Pippen.
The staff at Curry General Hospital in Gold Beach gave the retired mechanic and logger the ridiculously happy news this month, along with some pain pills.
Hospital administrator William McMillan says an errant keystroke caused the hospital's computer to spit out the wrong discharge instructions for the grandfather.
Lincoln police reported the rare occurrence of arresting a man who called them for help. Officials said a 25-year-old man called police Wednesday night to say someone was trying to break into his apartment.
When police arrived, they discovered it was the apartment manager trying to get into the apartment, which was supposed to be vacant.
Police said someone had illegally changed the locks on the apartment, and the man arrested was illegally occupying it.
Police also found more than three pounds of marijuana, equipment used to grow marijuana and nearly $3,500 in cash in the apartment.
Women have been warned to immediately stop using talcum powder around their genitals in the wake of research which suggests particles may travel to the ovaries and trigger a process of inflammation that allows cancer cells to flourish.
Although previous studies have raised concerns over talc, the latest findings from the United States suggest women who use it are 40 per cent more likely to get ovarian cancer - a much greater risk than first thought - the Telegraph newspaper reports.
The findings, published in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention, apply only to talcum powder used around the private parts, not on the rest of the body.
Experts from Harvard Medical School in Boston studied more than 3,000 women and found using talc merely once a week raised the risk of ovarian cancer by 36 per cent, rising to 41 per cent for those applying powder every day.
Dr Maggie Gates, who led the study, said that until the outcome of further research women should avoid using talc in the genital area.
One alternative is cornstarch powder.
The study revealed that the risks were greater still for those with a certain genetic profile.
. . .
Women who are overweight or use hormone replacement therapy are also thought to be more at risk.
Talc is made from a soft mineral called hydrous magnesium silicate, which is found throughout the world. It is crushed, dried and milled to produce powder used in cosmetic products by millions. Some experts say it has chemical similarities to asbestos, which can cause a deadly form of lung cancer.
Laboratory tests show ovarian cells exposed to talc divide more rapidly - a characteristic sign of cancer.
Until recently there was no proof that powder could travel through a woman's reproductive tract as far as the pelvis and then on to the ovaries.
But last year, a separate group of doctors at Harvard Medical School identified tiny particles of powder in the pelvis of a 68-year-old woman with advanced ovarian cancer who had used talc every day for 30 years.
Sixteen violins used by Jewish Holocaust victims -- including an instrument whose case was used to smuggle explosives that blew up a Nazi base -- were played on Wednesday in a concert in Jerusalem.
"Each violin has its own story," said Amnon Weinstein, 69, who together with his son has spent more than a decade restoring the violins collected from across Europe.
Weinstein, a violin maker, said he received the instruments in various states of disrepair, many of them decorated with stars of David, a testimony to their former Jewish owners.
"By restoring their violins, their legacy is born again," said Weinstein, who lost most of his family in the Holocaust.
They were played together for the first time in a concert titled "Violins of Hope" by members of Israel's Raanana Symphonette and the Philharmonia Istanbul Orchestra.
Before an audience of thousands gathered under the spot-lit walls of Jerusalem's Old City, world-renowned Israeli virtuoso Shlomo Mintz played "Avinu Malkeinu" (Our Father, Our King), a central prayer from the Jewish Day of Penitence.
One of the featured instruments, called Motele's Violin, belonged to a 12-year-old Jewish boy who played it for Nazi officers from Hitler's SS in Belarus in 1944.
Motele, with his violin, had joined other anti-Nazi partisans in a village near the border with Ukraine and managed to infiltrate a Nazi building there.
"The German officers heard him play in the streets one day and later brought him to perform every night in their compound in town," said Sefi Hanegbi, whose father played alongside Motele in a partisan camp in a forest during World War Two.
After each performance, Motele hid his violin in the building and walked out with an empty case. He would return with the violin case full of explosives, stuffing them into cracks in the walls, and eventually setting them off, Hanegbi said.
Motele was later killed in a German ambush, and Hanegbi's family brought his violin to Israel where it sat in a closet for decades. Weinstein first restored it about eight years ago.
The oldest violin in the collection, Weinstein said, had been donated to the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra by revered 19th-century Norwegian violinist Ole Bull.
Ernst Glaser, a Jewish musician, was set to perform with that violin in the German-occupied Norwegian city of Bergen in 1941, but the concert was interrupted when local pro-Nazi youth began rioting and threatened to lynch Glaser for "befouling" the famed instrument.
Only when the conductor instructed the orchestra to play the Norwegian national anthem, prompting the rioting youth to stand at attention, was Glaser able to escape, Weinstein said.
"The violin was our saviour," said Helen Livnat, 68, who donated the instrument her father used to earn food for her starving family in a ghetto in Ukraine in the early 1940s.
"It's an honor knowing the violins that were once played in a time of hunger and suffering will be heard again with pride in the country that we love," she said.
While men taking on responsibility for contraception is admirable, vasectomies are not always easy to reverse, and young men's scrotums being punctured left, right and centre like party balloons is not an ideal state of affairs.
A solution may be around the corner in the form of an Australian-designed system that switches a man's sperm flow on and off by remote control, operating a tiny valve injected into the vas deferens, the tube that carries sperm from the testes. In a bid to get men to embrace the new technology it is understood the remote can also be programmed to lock the car, shut the garage door, dim the bedroom lights, play a Barry White CD, record the football and put a pizza in the oven for afterwards.
Professor Derek Abbott from the University of Adelaide invented the system, which appeared on The New Inventors in June.
"I've been inundated with inquiries from men from all over the world," Abbott said in The Times this month.
Unfortunately the valve will need five years of animal trials before it can be used in human beings. The first four years will involve training rats how to use a remote.
The valve is just one of a number of high-tech reversible male contraceptive devices - known in leading scientific circles as "gizmos" - under development, The Times reports. In California a team is developing an implantable ring that circles the vas deferens and zaps sperm, making them unable to fertilise an egg.
Researchers recommend playing hardcore techno music rather than Barry White so that the sound of zapping blends in with the soundtrack. However, men over 30 have been warned not to try to keep pace with any tracks of more than 200 beats per minute.
A better method might be RISUG (reversible inhibition of sperm under guidance), which partially blocks sperm tubes and alters sperm through the injection of a compound. It takes 10 minutes and lasts 10 years.
RISUG is being trialled in India and may be on the market there within two years. Elaine Lissner, director of the non-profit Male Contraception Information Project in San Francisco, told The Times she could see Western men flying to India to get the injections, though it's unlikely their partners would still be in the mood by the time they got back.
"Men want new contraceptive methods," Lissner said. "A decade ago demand wasn't there and it was assumed women wouldn't trust men to take charge of birth control anyway. That has changed."
However, getting something from the laboratory to the pharmacy shelf is proving a slow process. Pharmaceutical companies are put off by the liability involved in testing on healthy young men, Lissner said, which must induce a lot of sympathy in healthy young women gradually being made unhealthy by the pill.
Lissner called on governments and charities to get involved in funding the next stage of trials. There are potentially more options out there than there are wrigglers in a specimen jar.
Neem extracts and papaya seeds, says the International Male Contraception Coalition (see malecontraceptives.org). Apparently a dry orgasm pill made a big splash when it was mooted two years ago.
Heat methods include a battery-operated scrotum heater, which would also provide somewhere to keep your hands warm in winter.
Alternatively, special underpants known as suspensories kill sperm by holding the testes close to the body, with the only side-effects being chafing and speaking in a very high voice.
Perhaps the most promising method involves blasting the testes with ultrasound. Not only does this disrupt sperm production for six months, but you get to take home a picture of them too.
It wasn't just the caffeine that gave an Iowa woman an extra jolt after she had her morning coffee. It was also the bat she found in the filter.
The Iowa Department of Public Health says the woman reported a bat in her house but wasn't too worried about it. She turned on her automatic coffee maker before bedtime and drank her coffee the next morning.
She discovered the bat in the filter when she went to clean it that night. The woman has undergone treatment for possible rabies.
Health officials say that the bat was sent to a lab but that its brain was too cooked by the hot water to determine whether it had rabies.
A lorry driver has been forced to flee after the 60,000 tins of custard and rice pudding he was transporting began to explode.
The cans of dessert exploded "like fireworks" after the a blaze broke out on his HGV.
The driver was unaware that his lorry, carrying 26 tonnes of Ambrosia custard and rice pudding to a local supermarket, was on fire and motorists were forced to flag him down.
He eventually stopped on the A382 in Chagford, Devon, and fled the truck seconds before 60,000 cans began exploding "like thousands of gunshots".
Fire crews raced to the blaze but the desserts were too well alight and the whole lorry was consumed in just 20 minutes.
Eyewitness Jill Pendleton, who runs a holiday booking company, captured the spectacle on her camera.
She said: "The first we knew about it was a whiff of smoke and burning sugar and then suddenly it just erupted.
"It was incredible how quickly the fire caught hold - the whole thing was over in less than 20 minutes.
"When the heat reached the tins they started to explode and we could hear what sounded like thousands of gunshots. It was quite a fireworks display.
A spokesman for Devon and Somerset Fire and Rescue Service said the road was closed for six hours while debris was cleared.
He said: "On arrival the crews found the lorry carrying rice pudding to be well alight on the highway. The incident was believed to be accidental."
Anyone who has ever used budget airlines know only too well how uncomfortable it can be: long queues, cramped seats and every tiny extra costs you.
But at least they are never told to get out and help push their plane.
That is exactly what happened to a group of passengers in China who were asked to get out and push after their plane broke down shortly after landing.
The Chinese Shandong airlines flight CRJ7 arrived safely at Zhengzhou from Guilin, but broke down before it could taxi to the passenger terminal.
Airport staff were called out to help push, but they had to ask some of the 69 passengers on board to help because the plane would not budge.
It took the group nearly two hours to shove the plane half a mile to a side lane.
One of the airport workers said: 'Thank God it was only a 20-ton medium-sized aeroplane. If it were a big plane, it would have knocked us out.'
The plane remained parked in the side lane on Friday night, waiting for technicians arriving on the next flight to fix the problem.
On bankers and 500-kilogram gorillas
George Bush was unable to help the hurricane-battered poor of New Orleans but somehow he's located a spare trillion dollars for his distressed friends on Wall Street. It's a rescue package for bankers - dropped from the skies above Manhattan. You wonder what's in it. Bespoke suits? Stripy shirts with white collars? Braces?
The bankers have been thrilled to receive the help. Offered a trillion dollars of other people's money, they find themselves instant converts to the world of socialism and government assistance. All that talk about the free market; all that sneering about central government: that is sooo last month. Welcome to the Wall Street branch of the People's Collective for Distressed Bankers. It's like watching an atheist on his death bed begging for a Bible; you half expect the bankers to sing The Red Flag at the start of each day's trade.
The bail-out is necessary, we're told, because the speculators made some bad investment decisions. Their worthless assets will now be bundled together and placed in a sort of Bad Debt Holding Company and the stinking mess presented to American taxpayers, encircled with a bow. Thank you, Wall Street. Not so much a gift horse as a decade's worth of its droppings.
It's been a big change in lifestyle for bankers. Right up until last month, every 10 minutes saw a Wall Street banker buying a luxury property in the Hamptons. They've now had to find that guy and make him stop. It doesn't look good now that taxpayers are paying the bill.
So, exactly when did governments start rescuing people from their own bad investment decisions? If they are going to start now, how about that $10 you put on the Melbourne Cup in 1987 or the $25 that went down the drain on last week's Powerball?
As Exhibit A, perhaps I could tender the House of Merivale and Mr John disco-style suit I purchased in 1986 in a moment of speculative madness. (I was speculating on the fact that white flares were on the way back.) It was a very, very bad investment decision, a fact that became apparent the instant I arrived home and had a moment's visual intercourse with my bedroom mirror. So should the taxpayers of America or Australia now come to my rescue?
I still have the suit. Perhaps Mr Bush would be willing to add it to the pile of steaming refuse that will make up the holdings of his True Stinkers Holding Company.
Already included are the wonderfully named institutions Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Who would have thought that the world's financial system rested on things with names like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? They sound like children's toys, most likely a line of rag puppets. What's your sister doing? "She's playing dress-ups with her Fannie Mae doll. She's pretending to marry her off to Freddie Mac."
Western capitalism survived al-Qaeda only to be brought down by a couple of Cabbage Patch dolls.
Either that or they are like characters from The Dukes Of Hazzard - hard-living Freddie Mac and his trashy girlfriend Fannie Mae. "Hey, Freddie, you seen Fannie Mae in her bikini? Oh my, that girl is highly leveraged."
So why are authorities suddenly rescuing the injured and foolish from the combat fields of capitalism? There's an answer to that, of course. You get bailed out when your size is so large and your mistakes so numerous that you can't be allowed to fail. A 500-kilogram gorilla with dyspepsia gets more attention than a mouse with a dicky heart.
In the end, they probably had no option other than to rescue the mad speculators - and quickly so, before they brought the roof down on all of us. But as the money is being doled out, can we at least ask for a few admissions? Can we demand that the gorilla at least takes some medicine for his continuing behaviour problems?
Can we all agree that the market, unfettered and uncontrolled, does not always get it right? Can we admit that capitalism is a great engine for material progress but that it needs to be guided and regulated?
We learnt all these lessons in the late '80s. So how come, so soon, we need to learn them all over again?
The other lessons of the late '80s, after all, seemed to have stayed with us. We remember that big hair can make a bad impression. That the Rubik's Cube gets boring after the first hour. And that white suit from the House of Merivale was a tragic error of judgment.
Why, then, do we have trouble remembering that other rule of the late '80s? Greed, unrestrained and unregulated, is not always that useful.
So far, the response to the profligacy of the speculators has been to supply new money but not new, permanent rules. So far, the response has been much like an old joke rendered into public policy: "It's true we're kleptomaniacs," the Wall Street bankers can still say. "But when it gets bad, we just take something for it."
He came. He soared. He conquered.
Birdman Yves Rossy powered into the record books yesterday with a remarkable cross-Channel flight - and a grin almost as big as his wingspan.
The Swiss adventurer stood on the White Cliffs of Dover after flying from France with a jet-propelled wing on his back and declared: 'It's like a dream come true.'
He parachuted into an English field 22 miles from Calais 13 minutes after takeoff. The 49-year-old aviator flew at up to 125mph after jumping from a plane 8,200ft above France.
Four jet engines on the single, 8ft wing allowed him to prove what he has always believed - that with a little help from technology, there's no reason why man shouldn't fly like a bird.
The route he chose retraced that plotted by cross-Channel pioneer Louis Bleriot when he flew the Channel in 1909. Back then, Monsieur Bleriot used a conventional looking aircraft and took 37 minutes.
Mr Rossy had twice postponed the attempt this week because of the weather. Yesterday Dover was bathed in brilliant sunshine and virtually cloudless skies. Inside the plane that took him up, he exchanged 'high fives' with his crew before leaping free. His wing tips unfolded and the jets fired up.
Apparently it wasn't too comfortable up there especially if, like Mr Rossy, you've got a bit of a bad back. The wing has limited mechanics and none of the technology boasted by his normal transport - as a pilot flying Swiss airliners.
He had a fuel lever to control the flow and an altimeter in his helmet to give various beeps at various heights. There were no brakes, and no steering wheel or joystick. Gentle manoeuvres of his head and arms were used to steer.
The only fuselage was his body, belly down towards the earth. He casually told us he used to be 'a bit of a daredevil' but doesn't now take unnecessary risks. That will be comfort indeed to the passengers he'll be piloting on Monday when he goes back to his regular job.
He told waiting reporters: 'It felt great, really great. I only have one word to all the people who helped me - thanks.'
Inside the plane Rossy had exchanged 'high fives' with his crew before he balanced himself on a step thousands of feet above ground with his compressed wing strapped to his back.
Final checks were then carried out on his wing before his jets were fired up and he leapt from the aircraft and across the Channel.
Minutes later he came into view for the scores of watchers gathered on top of the White Cliffs of Dover.
Rossy completed a few loops in the sky beyond the landing site before making his descent and deploying his parachute and landing next to the South Foreland lighthouse.
After landing with a bump, he waved and smiled as ambulance crews stood by.
The daredevil challenge by Rossy has led to him being compared to Superman and Buzz Lightyear, the computer-generated character from the animated film Toy Story.
