No Salesman Will Call - Vote For My Friends On MTV2

OK, so I've never asked you guys to do anything except read my little posts, but that's about to change. MTV2 is hosting a national competition on their site for the best bands in cities across the country. The top 2 per state (100 bands total) will put together an audio clip (song + interview) for college campuses around the U.S. to be narrowed down to 12 bands. Those 12 will compete at the MTV2 studios in NY to reduce the field to the finalists (2-3 bands voted on MTV.com) who will perform a live show. The winner gets $50,000, an MTV.com web page, and possible appearances on MTV Rock for a week. RYEWIRE, pictured above, is currently the #1 band in the Seattle area and they rank somewhere around #10 nationally (the other "#1" band on the site didn't register in time and so they're not actually in the running ). Could you take a minute to throw some votes their way?

I promise I'll never bother ya for anything else, and that includes the pony that I ask for every Christmas! The contest runs through Sept. 4th.

XOXO - FP

The Silversun Pickups - Another Cool Band

I find a lot of really great new music on my own- thank god- but sometimes it's good to have a little assist. The Silversun Pickups is a really great band that a musically-inclined friend with excellent taste turned me on to. With my typical "day late-dollar short" awareness, I missed them at the Capitol Hill Block Party in July, but the good news is that they'll be back in October. Yea!!!

Homesick Pt. 2

This is a picture that my friend David drew, back in the 70's. He just rediscovered it today and sent it to me. (I added the color). I don't know that it was specifically supposed to be me, but the hairdo is suspicious.....and familiar, isn't it? When I was younger, people always thought my hair was a wig. I think it's a little too worn out now to be confused with dynel. (historical note: dynel was a shiny synthetic material used to make cheap wigs a long time ago.....)

Homesick

Well, you met her there on a New York City stair
You were throwing up on your shoes
Tryin' to write the great book when it really had you shook
With a bad case of wintertime blues

So you drag her down to the ragged side of town
She had a taxi to carry her home
Then she left her handkerchief there beside you on the seat
As if to emphasize that you were all alone

It smelled like springtime and you were just a boy
And all the lilacs in Ohio
All the lilacs in Ohio. There ya go.
In the city streets and the dirty winter snow

All the lilacs in Ohio - hio.
Well, she's the love story you speak of
When you talk to Sam at the bar
But it's in the details your story often fails

Yeah, close, but no cigar
And you might see your own ass in a double whiskey glass
But you'll never erase her smile
And you'll never write it down, never find her in this town

Of phantom dreams and fingernail files
It was springtime, and you were just a boy
And all the lilacs in Ohio
All the lilacs in Ohio. There ya go

In city streets and the dirty winter snow
All the lilacs in Ohio - hio
So you pin her handkerchief to your clean white linen sheets
And you unmake your bed, crawl in

You imagine her there and you're tangled in her hair
And she smells like flowers again
And it's springtime, and you were just a boy
All the lilacs in Ohio

All the lilacs in Ohio. There ya go
In the city streets and the dirty winter snow
All the lilacs in Ohio - hio

John Hiatt - from the album 'The Tiki Bar Is Open'

Cupid Hits The Unemployment Line

Memo To The Windy City - Don't Stop Drinking Quite Yet!

We'll let you know when your "modern, fresh shopping experience" is ready!

CHICAGO (AP) - The owner of the Carson Pirie Scott department store announced Friday that it is closing the historic store because of a drop in sales and rise in operating costs.
The store is located in a building designated a National Historic Landmark and designed by famed architect Louis H. Sullivan in the late 19th century. The store was originally built in 1898-1899. There have been additions over the years, including a 12-story south addition in 1905-1906. According to the city's department of planning and development Web site, the store is "one of the most important structures in early modern architecture, famed for its influential modular construction and design."

"We are very proud of Carson Pirie Scott's rich tradition in Chicago -- a tradition that has prospered for more than 150 years ..." Bud Bergren, Bon-Ton's president and CEO said in a statement. "Unfortunately, this facility is more than 100 years old and no longer supports our efforts to provide quality customer service by giving our customers a modern, fresh shopping experience." The store is expected to close in March, 2007.

A New Kind Of 'Drunk Call' List

I have a friend who's compiled a convenient list on his myspace site of the people he'd be most likely to call after a drinking binge. Today, with the publication of Forbes magazine's list of 'America's Drunkest Cities', I can now go him one better by compiling a list in order of how likely it is that I'll receive a drunk call from a friend in most of the cities I've lived in.


Here's a brief overview of how Forbes put it all together:

To determine the rankings, Forbes started with a list of the largest metropolitan areas in the continental U.S. Thirty-five candidate cities were chosen based on availability of data and geographic diversity. Each city was ranked in five areas: state laws, number of drinkers, number of heavy drinkers, number of binge drinkers and alcoholism. Each area was assigned a ranking in each category, based on quantitative data, and all five categories were then totaled to produce a final score, which was sorted to produce the rankings.

Four of the cities I've lived in appear on this list, starting with my hometown of Columbus, Ohio, which ranks #3. Go Buckeyes!!! With the three-hour time difference, I'll be expecting to hear from you around 5 AM. Great. Just about an hour before I get up. Based on your ranking, along with the fact that there isn't a damn thing to do there, you get my vote for most likely to call!

Here are the rest:

#6 - Chicago - two hours ahead. You'll probably head right back to work from the bar, because the commute takes five hours.
#12 - Seattle - I'm here, but you'll probably decide to get a new tattoo.
#19 - Portland, Oregon - same time zone, but you'll be looking for your lost pet ferret.

Anyway, in case you decide to bypass these other options, I'll be waiting to hear from all of you, from all across this great booze - infused country of ours. And don't forget to remind me that I'm the "best friend you've ever, ever had, man", 'cause I'll be feeling exactly the same way about you.

The Peak Experience

"Human beings do not realise the extent to which their own sense of defeat prevents them from doing things they could do perfectly well. The peak experience induces the recognition that your own powers are far greater than you imagined them." – Colin Wilson

Peak experience: A term used to describe certain extra-personal and ecstatic states, particularly ones tinged with themes of unification, harmonization and interconnectedness. Participants characterize these experiences, and the revelations imparted therein, as possessing an ineffably mystical (or overtly religious) quality or essence.

American psychologist and philosopher Abraham H. Maslow (1908-1970) coined this term to describe nonreligious quasi-mystical and mystical experiences. Peak experiences are sudden feelings of intense happiness and well-being, and possibly the awareness of "ultimate truth" and the unity of all things. Accompanying these experiences is a heightened sense of control over the body and emotions, and a wider sense of awareness, as though one was standing upon a mountaintop. The experience fills the individual with wonder and awe. He feels at one with the world and is pleased with it; he or she has seen the ultimate truth or the essence of all things.

Maslow described peak experiences as self-validating, self-justifying moments with their own intrinsic value; never negative, unpleasant or evil; disoriented in time and space; and accompanied by a loss of fear, anxiety, doubts, and inhibitions.

Peak experiences render therapeutic value as they foster a sense of being lucky or graced; release creative energies; reaffirm the worthiness of life; and change an individual's view of himself or herself. Maslow cautioned against seeking such experiences for their own sake; echoing the advice of the mystics who have pointed out that the sacred exists in the ordinary. Maslow further believed that domestic and public violence, alcoholism, and drug abuse stem from spiritual emptiness, and that even one peak experience might be able to prevent, or at least abate, such ills.

I'm not sure what got me mulling over this subject today; could have been a number of things. I was working on a new cd cover and decided to combine an image of George Mallory, the famed lost climber of Everest from the 1920's, with a photo from the recent exploration that discovered his almost perfectly-preserved remains. Sounds gruesome, I know, but the title is going to be "What Was I Thinking?" You'd have to see it to get the joke, I guess. The typical 'me' thought process. Maybe my mind was doing a little free-associating. After all, a lot of therapists incorporate outdoor adventures into their sessions; experiences which are designed to jolt people into feeling the power and mystery associated with connecting with their surroundings. Sometimes these therapies include mountain climbing.

Anyway, I'm here to say that I believe in the existence of these experiences because I've had more than a few over the years and in some very unlikely places. That's what makes them so amazing. You can't practice for them, you can't set up a situation to make one happen. They take you by surprise and there you are, which is the coolest part. My most awe-inspiring one occurred about 16 years ago. Regrettably, I can't completely summon up the exact feeling of that afternoon, but the memory of what it was like is still so powerful that I'm encouraged to feel that I will have more like it someday. It may come tomorrow or it may be another 16 years, but I'm ready whenever it gets here. I'm not going to go into describing the circumstances or talk about who else was present on that extraordinary day. You know who you are, and you know what it was like, and that's all that matters. I just wanted to say thanks for being there. Until next time........

Pluto Gets The Old Heave-Ho

Capping years of intense debate, astronomers resolved Thursday to demote Pluto in a wholesale redefinition of planethood that is being billed as a victory of scientific reasoning over historic and cultural influences. But the decision is already being hotly debated. Officially, Pluto is no longer a planet.

"Pluto is dead," said Mike Brown, a planetary scientist at the California Institute of Technology who spoke with reporters via a teleconference while monitoring the vote. The decision also means a Pluto-sized object that Brown discovered will not be called a planet. "Pluto is not a planet," Brown said. "There are finally, officially, eight planets in the solar system." The vote involved just 424 astronomers who remained for the last day of a meeting of the International Astronomical Union in Prague.

"I'm embarrassed for astronomy. Less than 5 percent of the world's astronomers voted," said Alan Stern, leader of NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto and a scientist at the Southwest Research Institute. "This definition stinks, for technical reasons," Stern told Space.com. He expects the astronomy community to overturn the decision. Other astronomers criticized the definition as ambiguous.

The word "planet" originally described wanderers of the sky that moved against the relatively fixed background of star. Pluto, discovered in 1930, was at first thought to be larger than it is. It has an eccentric orbit that crosses the path of Neptune and also takes it well above and below the main plane of the solar system. Recent discoveries of other round, icy object in Pluto's realm have led most astronomers to agree that the diminutive world should never have been termed a planet.

The resolution: The decision establishes three main categories of objects in our solar system.

Planets: The eight worlds starting with Mercury and moving out to Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

Dwarf planets: Pluto and any other round object that "has not cleared the neighborhood around its orbit, and is not a satellite."

Small solar system bodies: All other objects orbiting the sun.

Working Both Sides Of The Room

The Outsider And Me

"This image has enough to go off like (a) 100 sticks of dynamite" - Henry Darger 1892-1973

Henry Darger, an elderly recluse, spent his childhood in Illinois's asylum for feeble-minded children and his adulthood working as a janitor. He lived a quiet, nearly solitary existence, but his imaginary life was exciting, colorful and sexually provocative. When he died in Chicago in 1973, his landlady discovered in his room 300 paintings, some over 10 feet long, and a 15,000-page illustrated novel (The Realms of the Unreal), which told the epic story of the virtuous Vivian Girls leading a child slave revolt against the evil Glandelinians.

I just returned from seeing the Henry Darger exhibition at The Frye Art Museum. I am still attempting to process what I saw and the feelings that arose from viewing the work of this outsider artist who was diagnosed at the age of six as "having his heart in the wrong place" and was then sent to live in an asylum until he engineered his own escape at the age of 16. I saw the documentary on Darger, 'In the Realms of the Unreal' about a month ago, somewhat apprehensively because I have a very strong, visceral reaction to anything having to do with asylums and institutions for the 'not-quite-right' among us, owing to some personal experience involving a family member who died in such a place. Believe me when I say an experience like that never, ever leaves you. As difficult as it was to watch, I know I will see the film again when its creator, Jessica Yu screens it in October, because the world of Henry Darger now resides in my head and it's not leaving, either.

After finally succeeding in making his escape from the asylum after a series of failed attempts beginning when he was six, Henry spent the rest of his life under the radar, working as a janitor and sometimes attending as many as 5 masses a day at the neighboring Catholic church. All the while, he was orchestrating and documenting the battle that quietly raged on in his mind. From the age of 19 until his death at 81, in his tiny one room apartment in Chicago, Darger created the epic known to us as 'The Story of the Vivian Girls, In what Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion'. 15,000 pages. Whew.

I haven't read any criticism or analysis of Darger's work. I would rather react and respond in ways that are meaningful to me and unfiltered by the impressions of others. It is my belief that to define and delineate it in a scholarly manner only plays into the hands of those whom Darger was trying to elude; the established hierarchy of the entire world as we know it. His experience told him it was simply not to be trusted. Faced with what I see around me these days, how can I not concur? He created the war of the Glandelinians and the Vivian Girls in order to right the wrong that had been done to him as a child and to illustrate the inherent cruelty that he felt the world held in store for children and that they must be protected from, no matter how great the cost.

Punctuated with riotous bursts of colorful flowers, birds and incredible weatherscapes, the land inhabited by the Vivian Girls is at once both frightening and fantastic. Mention must be made of Darger's adeptness at synthesizing imagery from the popular culture of the day into his work. One can see the stride of the Morton Salt girl as well as the posture of the Coppertone Suntan Lotion baby in his drawings. The other-worldly insects and oversized foliage directly reference the cartoon 'Buck Rogers in the 25th Century', as well as the thousands of other archived newspaper and magazine clippings found after his death. The message that I take away after seeing just a small sampling of his work is that art does flourish best and most authentically in these naive expressions created by 'Outsiders' who feel to their very core what it means to be on the inside and have rejected that existence in favor of living in a world of their own making.

Substitute The Phrase "Moonwalk Tapes" For Woodpecker

WASHINGTON - NASA scientists have joined the search for the elusive ivory-billed woodpecker, long thought to be extinct but recently sighted in Arkansas. NASA used a laser-equipped research aircraft to fly over the Big Woods area of the Mississippi Delta to learn more about the big woodpecker’s potential habitat, the space agency said Thursday. Scientists from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and the University of Maryland used an instrument that sends pulses of energy to Earth’s surface, where light particles from the lasers bounce off leaves, branches and the ground and reflect back to the instrument.

These signals give scientists a direct measurement of the height of the forest’s leaf-covered treetops, the ground level below and everything in between, NASA said in a statement. “We’re trying to understand the environment where these birds live or used to live,” said Woody Turner, a NASA scientist. Knowing the thickness of ground vegetation, the density of tree leaves and other factors including closeness to water and age of the forest might help in the search, he said.

NASA’s aerial effort is part of a quest that began in 2004 after a kayaker reported spotting the woodpecker along the Cache River in Arkansas. Before that, there had been no confirmed sightings of ivory-bills for half a century. Bird experts have searched on the ground, looking for nesting spots, leaving remote-controlled cameras and audio recorders in places that seem likely habitats for the woodpecker. But so far they have captured no confirmed images or sound recordings of the creature.

In 2005, researchers published a report in the journal Science that at least one male ivory-bill still survived, but this finding has been challenged. The NASA-University of Maryland project aims to give detailed information about the bird’s habitat to searchers on the ground, who can use it starting this fall to look for new evidence of the ivory-billed woodpecker’s possible survival.

Saved By Silicone: One Woman’s Close Call

Shrapnel from rocket lodged in implants, sparing Israeli woman

JERUSALEM - An Israeli woman's breast implants saved her life when she was wounded in a Hezbollah rocket attack during Israel's war with the Lebanese group, a hospital spokesman said Tuesday.

Doctors found shrapnel embedded in the silicone implants, just inches from the 24-year-old’s heart. "She was saved from death," said a spokesman for Nahariya Hospital in northern Israel. The woman has been released from the hospital.

And..........

Search is on for original Apollo 11 footage

On July 20, 1969, astronauts first landed on the moon. On that day, a special video camera designed by Westinghouse, hardened to survive the harsh lunar atmosphere, sent high-quality images of the event back to Earth. Unfortunately, these exact images were not the ones viewed by millions of people around the globe. The video images produced by the camera were incompatible with commercial television broadcasting equipment, so NASA engineers used a simple workaround. They aimed a commercial TV camera at the display feed and, voila, the lower quality, ghostly images of Neil Armstrong stepping out of the Eagle lander that were are so familiar with, were transmitted. The high quality feeds were not seen outside of Mission Control in Houston.

In the ensuing years, these high quality tapes were moved from one storage facility to another and subsequently lost. NASA is trying to find them as the magnetic tape on which they are stored degrades over time. Similar NASA tapes have turned up in the garages of one time NASA engineers as well as the Goddard Space Flight Center (where the collection is supposed to be housed). So, do you know where the Moon Landing tapes are? If so, NASA wants to know.

News On The Hour

What we're following today:

As stories about Dell laptop fires spread, Dell has decided to recall 4.1 million laptop batteries, a Dell insider told ConsumerAffairs.Com. The insider, ex-Dell engineer Robert Day, said the problem appears to be caused by batteries Sony manufactured for Dell between 2003 and 2006.

A source at the U.S. Consumer Products Safety Commission, who did not want to be identified, confirmed the recall but said full details would not be made available until early tomorrow morning.

A Dell spokesman confirmed the company had "negotiated conditions of the recall" with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. It will be the largest electronics-related recall ever conducted by the agency.

On August 3, ConsumerAffairs.Com reported the story of Thomas Forqueran, stranded at Lake Mead State Park in Nevada after a Dell laptop set his vintage truck ablaze. That story came in the wake of two other summer Dell laptop blazes -- one in which cameras caught an exploding Dell laptop at a conference in Japan. The other took place in Illinois where a Dell laptop spurted flames for over five minutes and forced an evacuation of an office building.

I Have A Permission Slip

Because today is my Saturday and I deserve it. Please be nice and don't pull my ears.

Is It Fate?

Overheard At The Airport Today

I was watching CNN and they were showing women lined up in front of these giant trash bins, emptying their purses of all of their makeup. One woman, after throwing away $100 worth of stuff (which these days, was probably two items) said:
"You'd like to think that somebody knew what they were doing, and that all of this is necessary, but I don't think you can blow up a plane with blush."

Thoughts Better Kept To Oneself

Coming Soon

The Eternal Allure Of Anna Magnani

When I was five years old I accompanied my mother to see a film of a Tennessee Williams play called “The Rose Tattoo”. Back in the 1950’s there were no film ratings and no prohibitions about taking children just about anywhere. As a result, I ended up in some pretty strange situations – but when you’re a kid, it’s all just “More fun!” Today, if I were a five year old, I probably wouldn't be allowed to get within 20 feet of a theater showing this kind of steamy content. I’m not sure why I've always remembered this experience; I don’t even remember the plot and had to look it up to see what it was about. Perhaps it's because it was probably one of the last times my mother and I went anywhere in her little yellow Nash Rambler before she got sick. Magnani plays an Italian widow who’s withdrawn from the world, living in Louisiana and raising her teenage daughter. Big fun ensues when she discovers that the husband who's loss she's been grieving over for years had been two-timing her right up until the day the cops shot him for some petty crime. The "other" woman defiantly gets a rose tattoo like the dead man to commemorate their illicit love. Burt Lancaster shows up with a bad haircut and then also buys himself a $2.50 tattoo like the husband’s, trying to find a way into Magnani's heart. (Wrong!) It just occured to me it would have been pretty funny if by the end of the film, everyone in the audience ended up getting a rose tattoo as well. The plot is pretty over-the-top, and definitely not one of Williams’ better efforts, but it served as an excellent showcase for the depth and breadth of Magnani’s ability to throw one heck of a never-ending tantrum. She won an Academy Award for Best Actress for this film. See Rossellini’s “Open City”, if you want to see a truly heart-breaking example of the nuanced performance she was capable of creating.

Born March 7, 1908, in Alexandria, Egypt, Magnani was raised by her grandmother in the slums of Rome. She studied acting at Santa Cecilia's Corso Eleanora Duse but began her performing career as a nightclub singer before moving on to variety theaters and stock and then to film. She worked with all of the greats; Visconti, Pasolini, Renoir.

Middle-aged when she became "a star," Magnani had already spent 20 years putting together the persona with which she would be forever identified: a vital, physical woman of the people, brimming with bawdy wit and tragic depth. Revelling in her own glorious decay, she would never shy away from a role just because she was afraid it might make her look bad; the cornerstone of her art was instinct, not image -- less technique than unbridled ego. When Magnani played a mother, as she often did, there was never any hemming and hawing about the potential pitfalls of self-sacrifice -- and when she played a hooker, which she often also did, it was no Pretty Woman. I can’t think of an actress working today who embodies the same passion and intensity that she brought to every role. She appeared in her last film in 1969 and died in 1973.

As a young adult, I had a Fotofolio postcard of Magnani on my dining room table. She was in profile, pensively clasping a bullfighter’s jacket. The table also served as my workspace for my collages and constructions, so I spent a considerable amount of time in the presence of that image. It was a beautiful picture and I wish I knew where it was now. I’ve found what I consider an acceptable substitute to accompany this post, but the emotion conveyed is a very different one. Nevertheless, isn’t her face amazing?

I've Been Meaning To Mention This For Awhile

Personally, I felt that the revolution had a better beat and was easier to dance to than the album.

1500 Hits Tonight

I was pretty surprised tonight to see I've reached 1500 hits on this site since it started in February. I'm happy.

Project Runway - "I'm Underwhelmed"

As much as I hate to do it, I'm going to have to appropriate Michael Kors' signature comment to describe how I feel about the new season of Project Runway. The designers all seem so......creepy or weird or just plain forgettable, I guess. Tonight is the episode where somebody gets disqualified and is sent packing. Shocking!!! Who cares. My vague impression of this crop of competitors is that there's an anorexic Geena Davis lookalike who hates dogs, a very "ggggggay" ( expression courtesy of last season, when we still cared) southern boy with a fabulous! complexion, some guy with a Maori tattoo around his neck like a collar, (ouch!), a skinny smart-ass guy who insists on doing everything "his way" and still doesn't get eliminated, (yeah, we know where this one's going-right to the final three), someone named Uli who when she talks, sounds like we think Bjork would sound if we ever heard her talk, and then there's a bunch of other people. Guess I'll just have to wait around for the next season of Top Chef. At least there's sharp implements ("Please pack your knives and go!") with that one, and unforgettable phrases like, "I ain't your bitch, bitch".

Are We All On The Same Page Now? - Mel Gibson Has ALWAYS Been An Asshole

I just wish that years ago, when Mel Gibson was discovered to be the raging homophobe that we all know him to be, everyone had denounced him as vigorously then as he is being denounced now. If the public outcry had been of this magnitude back then, maybe we wouldn't have to be subjected now to this horseshit (there, I said it!) round-the-clock analysis of whether or not his career is over. Perhaps we could have used this time to focus instead on the fact that the Middle East is rapidly turning into a giant ashtray. Perhaps.

While we're on the subject, Lou Dobbs and 'Howitzer Blow-up Guy' (Wolf Blitzer), go f- yourselves. We'll wait over here.

Forget The Lemonade Stand

Hey Kids - here's a great way to augment your allowance this summer!

Rare Cloud Formation Seen In Antarctica

Polar winter produces nacreous clouds, -189 degree temperatures. Penguins from Rio (see previous post) express appreciation for spectacular salutation.

HOBART, Australia - Some of the coldest temperatures on Earth brought a rare cloud formation to the skies over Antarctica, scientists said Tuesday.
Meteorological officer Renae Baker captured spectacular images of the nacreous clouds, also known as polar stratospheric clouds, last week at Australia's Mawson station in Antarctica.
The clouds only occur at high polar latitudes in winter, requiring temperatures less than minus 176 Fahrenheit. A weather balloon measured temperatures at minus 189 Fahrenheit on the day the photos were taken. Resembling an airborne mother-of-pearl shell, the clouds are produced when fading light at sunset passes through water-ice crystals blown along a strong jet of stratospheric air more than six miles above the ground.

No Scissors Needed

My internal clock is completely out of sync tonight. I woke up at 8 PM, thinking it was 8 in the morning. Drank my coffee, had some yogurt and wondered why the day was starting off so overcast?!? Now I'm sitting here at 2:30, predictably unable to get back to sleep. This site, i-dressup.com, is a lot of fun and with hundreds of pages featuring many different designers, celebrities and clothing companies, I can probably sit here until the real morning comes and never get bored, clicking through this online version of paper dolls. Who wouldn't want the chance to put Mariah Carey in a burqa? Well...actually the choices aren't that wild, but surely we can find something better than that sausage casing she was shoved into for her appearance at the Grammys.

Seems Like Only Yesterday......

I Recognize The Name, But Not The Face

Bar server checking patron’s age is handed her own driver’s license

WESTLAKE, Ohio - A bar waitress checking to see if a woman was legally old enough to drink was handed her own stolen driver's license, which was reported missing weeks earlier, police said. "The odds of this waitress recovering her own license defy calculation," police Capt. Guy Turner said Monday. Maria Bergan, 23, of Lakewood, was charged Sunday night with identity theft and receiving stolen property. She was arrested at her home in suburban Cleveland and was jailed in Westlake to await a court appearance. The 22-year-old waitress, whose name was not released, called police last week and said she had been handed her own stolen driver's license by a woman trying to prove she was 21. The woman, who became suspicious of the delay as the waitress went to call police, fled the Moosehead Saloon, but her companion provided her name. The waitress said she had lost her wallet July 9 at a bar in Lakewood. She also had a credit card stolen. The stolen card has been used to make $1,000 in purchases, Turner said.

Chilly Willy Misses Out On Carnivale

Penguins to get a free lift home after washing up on beaches in Rio

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil - Brazil’s air force and navy will transport more than 100 penguins to Antarctica next month after the flightless birds were stranded on Rio de Janeiro beaches. Penguins arrive from the Antarctic Circle on ice floes that melt in the vicinity of Brazil’s shore and the birds wash up on Rio beaches every winter.
Typically, many of the birds are sent to local zoos. A plane carrying equipment for an Antarctic naval base will take the penguins to Brazil’s southernmost region next month, an air force spokesman said Monday. They will continue their journey on a naval ship, which will release them into the ocean in their Antarctic habitat.

Getting Fresh

With reports coming in from my friends all around the country that the mercury is going through the roof - resulting in sweltering temperatures, freak thunderstorms and fish walking out of the sea, I thought we might enjoy taking a break and freshening up a bit. In these trying, sweaty times, nothing fills the bill like a moist towelette. I saw a feature on this last night on the Food Network. It's the Online Moist Towelette Museum. There, that's better isn't it? Now, off you go.......