I'm Gina Smith

Pringles can inventor gets buried in it. (Slashdot, via Steve.)

"Dr. Fredric J. Baur was so proud of having designed the container for Pringles... that he asked his family to bury him in one. His children honored his request. Part of his remains was buried in a Pringles can — along with a regular urn containing the rest... Dr. Baur, a retired organic chemist and food storage technician who specialized in research and development and quality control for Procter & Gamble, died May 4 at 89... He developed many products, including frying oils and a freeze-dried ice cream, for P&G... But the Pringles can was his proudest accomplishment, his daughter said. He received a patent for the package as well as the method of packaging Pringles in 1970."

Japanese man finds woman is living in his closet. (Reuters).

This from Reuters. Very odd news. Do you think it is possible he does actually know the woman but is covering this up for some crazy reason? Could you not really notice someone living in your closet? Notice the similiarity in ages. Strange.

TOKYO (Reuters) - A Japanese man who was mystified when food kept disappearing from his kitchen, set up a hidden camera and found an unknown woman living secretly in his closet, Japanese media said Friday.

The 57-year-old unemployed man of Fukuoka in southern Japan called police Wednesday when the camera sent pictures to his mobile phone of an intruder in his home while he was out on Wednesday, the Asahi newspaper said on its Website.

Officers rushed to the house and found a 58-year-old unemployed woman hiding in an unused closet, where she had secreted a mattress and plastic drink bottles, the Asahi said. Police suspect she may have been there for several months, the paper said.

"I didn't have anywhere to live," the Nikkan Sports tabloid quoted the woman as telling police.

Local police confirmed that they had arrested a woman for trespassing, but would not comment further on the case.

A bull literally ran through their living room!

Here's an odd story from Reuters today.

BERLIN (Reuters) - A German family were stunned when a rampaging bull burst through the back door of their house, charged around the living room, and then left by the front door.

"The animal basically did a tour of the hall, the kitchen and the living room before leaving the building," said Paul Kemen, a spokesman for police in the western city of Aachen on Monday. "It came in the back and went out the front."

None in the family were injured, but the bull laid waste to furnishings, causing an estimated 10,000 euros ($15,600) of damage, police said. The bull left after the owner of the house opened the front door for it.

The red-brown Limousin bull was part of a herd of cattle that had escaped from a farmer and overrun a section of the nearby town of Monschau. A huntsman later shot the animal.

(Reporting by Dave Graham; Editing by Matthew Jones)

I am allowed to say "only in the Former-Yugoslavia"

... because I am half Yugoslavian. (of Montenegran descent, actually). At any rate, I suppose this could happen in any busy city where people are too cold to know their neighbors or keep in touch with family. I need help in these regards, too. Maybe we all do.

But this story is sad. If you're weepy, skip the below from AP wire today.

ZAGREB, Croatia (AP) -- Governments have changed. War erupted and ended. Neighbors had children, and then grandchildren. But Hedviga Golik never left her tiny apartment in Croatia's capital -- until her mummified body was carried out this week, 35 years after she died.

Police said Friday that no one ever reported Golik missing and no one has come to claim her body.

Residents of her loft building in downtown Zagreb had broken into Golik's flat after deciding that the apartment should belong to them, and not to her. Startled by the remains in bed, they called police.

Forensics experts said Golik likely died in 1973, about the time a neighbor last saw her. Expert Davor Strinovic said she seemed to have died of natural causes, but "it's almost impossible to say for certain" after so much time.

Some of Golik's neighbors claimed she had talked about going abroad.

Experts said her windows had been open, likely diminishing the smell. It remained unclear who -- if anyone -- was paying her bills and who exactly owned the apartment. In the 1970s, when Golik died, apartments were state-owned.

Neighbors now argue the apartment should be divided among the remaining tenants.

The discovery of Golik's body on Tuesday prompted media debates on how it is possible for a woman to die so long ago without anyone noticing. One local journalist said it showed people were becoming more alienated.

"My dear neighbors! Please keep on being curious and a bit tiresome, as you have been so far," Merita Arslani wrote in the Jutarnji list daily

Well, if green aliens are really coming to visit ...

... at least they picked the en vogue color. It's cool to be green. Crazy-bizarre story out of London today excerpted below.

But before you read it. Consider. Maybe they're coming to stop us from firing up the new CERN particle accelerator some physicists think will suck the world into a black hole. AGH!

Could world news get any weirder? Ask me tomorrow.

By Jeremy Lovell

LONDON (Reuters) - Aliens from outer space have been visiting Britain for years and UFO sightings doubled after the film Close Encounters was released in 1977, according to secret files collating reports by members of the public.

The alien craft come in all shapes, sizes and colors but their occupants are uniformly green, the Ministry of Defence files show.

The archives (at www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ufos) are the first batch of a four-year release programme of all the ministry's UFO files from 1978 to the present day.

The ministry dismisses 90 percent of the reports as having mundane explanations and leave 10 percent with a question mark and the assurance they are no defence threat.

A 1983 report from a 78-year-old out fishing at midnight tells of following aliens in green overalls on to a spaceship and then being told to go away because he was too old and decrepit for their purposes.

Two years later, a typewritten letter to the ministry tells of an alien spaceship being shot down in the river Mersey in northern England by another spacecraft and of the author developing a warm friendship with an alien called Algar.

Just as Algar was about to reveal himself to the government he was killed by other aliens, the author of the letter writes. He was still in telepathic contact with an alien called Malcben from the planet Platone in the Milky Way, the author added.

Written at the top of the letter is the terse comment "No reply."

The ministry has files on 11,000 sightings dating back to the 1950s. A few of the sightings made it into the national press and all were checked out in case they were Soviet aircraft probing Britain's defences during the Cold War.

"Clearly some reports remain unexplained but we have found no evidence that these phenomena represent a threat to national security and therefore cannot justify devoting Defence resources to their investigation," said an official letter in 1985.

WORKING PARTY

The term Unidentified Flying Object was coined in a U.S. Air Force report three years after the description 'flying saucer' was applied to a sighting in Washington State in June 1947.

In Britain, so worrying was the spate of reports that a secret Flying Saucer Working Party was formed to check them out.

Like the U.S. Air Force, it concluded flying saucers did not exist. But its final report in 1951 was still classified "secret/discreet" and given very limited circulation.

Not all sightings can be easily dismissed as the working of overwrought or intoxicated minds, or triggered by watching Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Royal Air Force personnel, civil aviation pilots and air traffic controllers have also reported sightings and radar tracks that remain unexplained despite high-level investigation.

Among the most famous was the sighting on two occasions of unexplained bright lights landing near a U.S. airbase in Rendlesham Forest in southern England. Even the deputy commander of the base put his name to that 1980 report.

(Editing by Robert Woodward)

New non-smoking technology in Japan may foil teen smokers. (Reuters)

This seems like technology that is unlikely to catch any smoker under 35. But let's see.

TOKYO (Reuters) - Cigarette vending machines in Japan may soon start counting wrinkles, crow's feet and skin sags to see if the customer is old enough to smoke.

The legal age for smoking in Japan is 20 and as the country's 570,000 tobacco vending machines prepare for a July regulation requiring them to ensure buyers are not underage, a company has developed a system to identify age by studying facial features.

By having the customer look into a digital camera attached to the machine, Fujitaka Co's system will compare facial characteristics, such as wrinkles surrounding the eyes, bone structure and skin sags, to the facial data of over 100,000 people, Hajime Yamamoto, a company spokesman said.

"With face recognition, so long as you've got some change and you are an adult, you can buy cigarettes like before. The problem of minors borrowing (identification) cards to purchase cigarettes could be avoided as well," Yamamoto said.

Japan's finance ministry has already given permission to an age-identifying smart card called "taspo" and a system that can read the age from driving licenses.

It has yet to approve the facial identification method due to concerns about its accuracy.

Yamamoto said the system could correctly identify about 90 percent of the users, with the remaining 10 percent sent to a "grey zone" for "minors that look older, and baby-faced adults," where they would be asked to insert their driving license.

Underage smoking has been on a decline in Japan, but a health ministry survey in 2004 showed 13 percent of boys and 4 percent of girls in the third year of high school -- those aged 17 to 18 -- smoked every day.

(Reporting by Yoko Kubota; editing by Miral Fahmy)

Passenger arrested for on-plane cell phone use!

Unbelievable?

http://news.aol.com/story/_a/airline-passenger-cited-for-cell-phone/20080512151509990001

p.s. I am now ginasmith888 on twitter. I am trying to figure out whether this twitter business is worth a minute more of my time. If you have an opinion, let me know or better yet -- twitter me : )

gs

Watching John Dvorak twitter in the Air France lounge.

It is odd -- sitting here waiting for my KAL flight, watching John Dvorak twitter in the Air France lounge.

Drunk man "sleeps off" stabbing (BBC)

Yuri Lyalin, 53, took a bus home, ate breakfast and apparently slept like a baby before his spouse noticed a handle sticking out of his back. He was rushed to casualty but doctors found no vital organs damaged. Mr Lyalin shrugged the episode off but the drinking partner who stabbed him faces trial, Russian media report. "Unique and intriguing the case may be, but the accused faces a severe punishment," said Pavel Vorobyov, a deputy prosecutor in the northern city of Vologda. Mr. Lyalin, an electrician, had spent the evening drinking with a watchman at his workplace when they got into an argument, Interfax news agency reports. The morning found him waking up in the watchman's office but instead of going back to work, he decided to take the bus home. At home, Mr Lyalin had some sausage from the fridge and lay down to sleep, the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper says. After a couple of hours, his wife noticed the handle sticking out of his back and called an ambulance. Viktor Belov, a surgeon who treated him, found a kitchen knife in Mr Lyalin's back but "by good fortune, it had gone through soft tissue without touching vital organs". His alleged attacker reported the crime to the police himself, Interfax adds. Mr Lyalin apparently feels fine and bears no ill-will. "We were drinking and what doesn't happen when you're drunk?" he was quoted by Komsomolskaya Pravda as saying.

Elephant paints eerily accurate self-portrait with trunk.

After watching this, I am not sure I will be able to sleep now. Well, elephants do have huge brains. Click below.

This will blow your mind.