Once A Marine

Always a Marine. A 72-year old Michigan man felt someone trying to pick his pocket. The former Marine - who also was a Golden Gloves boxer years ago - grabbed the hand trying to rob him and turned around and beat the tar out of the thief attached to it.

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. - Bill Barnes says he was scratching off a losing $2 lottery ticket inside a gas station when he felt a hand slip into his front-left pants pocket, where he had $300 in cash.

He immediately grabbed the person's wrist with his left hand and started throwing punches with his right, landing six or seven blows before a store manager intervened.

"I guess he thought I was an easy mark," Barnes, 72, told The Grand Rapids Press for a story Tuesday.

He's anything but an easy mark: Barnes served in the Marines, was an accomplished Golden Gloves boxer and retired after 20 years as an iron worker.

Jesse Daniel Rae, the 27-year-old Newaygo County man accused of trying to pick Barnes' pocket, was arraigned Monday in Rockford District Court on one count of unarmed robbery, a 15-year felony.

I just love stories like this. Young thug gets huge surprise when "old geezer" turns out to have never accepted being either old or a geezer! Note to criminal masterminds: there is a lesson here.

Giant Pygmy Bigfoot

The words just fit together, don't they? First: Giant Man-Eating Penguins!

WASHINGTON - Giant penguins as tall as 5 feet roamed what is now Peru more than 40 million years ago, much earlier than scientists thought the flightless birds had spread to warmer climes. Known mostly for their presence in Antarctica, penguins today live in many islands in the Southern Hemisphere, some even near the equator.

But scientists thought they hadn't reached warm areas until about 10 million years ago

Now, researchers report in this week's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they have found remains of two types of penguin in Peru that date to 40 million years ago.

One of them was a 5-foot giant with a long sharp beak.

Ok, technically, man hadn't been exactly invented back then. But the penguins would have eaten them if they'd been available. Next up: A Pygmy Hippo!

PARIS - Aldo looks, eats and lazes like a hippopotamus — but he's only about as big as a human baby, at 21 inches. The pygmy hippo, born this month at the Paris Zoo, is one of only a few dozen in Europe, bred in a special program to boost the rare species.

There are no more than 3,000 around the world, mostly concentrated in west African countries such as Sierra Leone, Guinea Bissau or Liberia, said Juliane Villenain, a biologist at the zoo in the Bois de Vincennes, a park on Paris' eastern edge. According to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, pygmy hippos have already disappeared from Nigeria.

Pygmy hippopotamuses are, unlike their bigger brethren, lonely animals, except during reproduction season. The female takes care of the newborn by herself, as little Aldo's mother Anais did, Villenain said.

One question: How do you tell if it's a runt? Last but not least, we got Bigfoot!

MANISTIQUE, Mich. - Researchers will visit the Upper Peninsula next month to search for evidence of the hairy manlike creature known as "Bigfoot" or "Sasquatch."

The expedition will center in eastern Marquette County, following the most recent Bigfoot eyewitness account, said Matthew Moneymaker of the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization.

"We'll be looking for evidence supporting a presence. … We hope to meet local people who might have seen a Sasquatch or heard of someone else who had an encounter," Moneymaker told the Daily Press of Escanaba.

Most experts consider the Bigfoot legend to be a combination of folklore and hoaxes, but there are a number of authors and researchers who think the stories could be true.

Meanwhile, the locals - in the way locals always do - are fine-tuning their very best sincere faces. That way they won't bust out laughing until after the researchers leave the room. We'd still like to see a giant pygmy bigfoot, though.

Something (Bad) Happening Here

Stanley Kurtz over at NRO points out the bad vibration coming from the Senate immigration "reform" bill that has reared its ugly head again. Something isn't working.

Something about this immigration battle doesn’t sit well. For all the bitterness of our political battles, there’s at least the sense that the government responds to the drift of public opinion. The Republicans in Congress turned into big spenders and the war in Iraq went poorly. As a result the Democrats prospered in 2006, if narrowly. That’s how democracy works. Our politics are often angry and ugly (and that’s a problem), but this is because the public is deeply divided on issues of great importance. Deep down, we understand that our political problems reflect our own divisions.

Somehow this immigration battle feels different. The bill is wildly unpopular, yet it’s close to passing. The contrast with the high-school textbook version of democracy is not only glaring and maddening, it’s downright embarrassing. Usually, even when we’re at each others’ throats, there’s still an underlying pride in the democratic process. This immigration battle strips us of even that pride.

I’m still stuck on the way this bill was going to be pushed through without a public airing of crucial provisions, in the two or three days before Memorial Day recess. But I should be stuck even further back–on the way this bill was cooked up in a backroom deal that bypassed the ordinary process of public hearings. We take them for granted, but those civics textbook fundamentals are there for a reason. We’re going to pay a steep price for setting the fundamentals aside.

Kurtz is right. This thing stinks of a smoke-filled back room deal. There is a crisis of confidence in the Congress in general and passage of this bill will deepen that. I'm one of the people who happen to believe that the whole situation can be solved if they fix the border first. But I don't think this bill does that and I don't think it's good for the country. Kurtz is right: this bill has a bad feeling to it.

Solving Tunguska?

Italian researchers believe they may have found an impact crater that would help explain the Tunguska mystery. In 1908 something happened in that remote area of Siberia that flattened 800 square miles of forest. Up until now, however, scientists have been at a loss to explain what caused the event.

In late June of 1908, a fireball exploded above the remote Russian forests of Tunguska, Siberia, flattening more than 800 square miles of trees. Researchers think a meteor was responsible for the devastation, but neither its fragments nor any impact craters have been discovered.

Astronomers have been left to guess whether the object was an asteroid or a comet, and figuring out what it was would allow better modeling of potential future calamities.

Italian researchers now think they've found a smoking gun: The 164-foot-deep Lake Cheko, located just 5 miles northwest of the epicenter of destruction.

"When we looked at the bottom of the lake, we measured seismic waves reflecting off of something," said Giuseppe Longo, a physicist at the University of Bologna in Italy and co-author of the study. "Nobody has found this before. We can only explain that and the shape of the lake as a low-velocity impact crater."

Should the team turn up conclusive evidence of an asteroid or comet on a later expedition, when they obtain a deeper core sample beneath the lake, remaining mysteries surrounding the Tunguska event may be solved.

The findings are detailed in this month's online version of the journal Terra Nova.

They even found an anomaly that may actually be part of whatever hit the region almost 100 years ago.