Have a great Sunday!!

"Once in awhile we get shown the light, in the strangest of places, if we look at it right" - Hunter/Garcia

A campaign in France to exterminate frogs may sound like the beginning of a civil war, but these are no ordinary frogs.

Hunters working for the government's wildlife agency will be stalking ponds in south-west France this weekend, aimed with flash-lights, rifles, silencers and night-vision sights.

They have been mobilised for the most intensive effort so far to terminate a plague of giant Californian bullfrogs which is threatening to disrupt the ecology of the Gironde, Dordogne and several other départements.

The aggressive and voracious bullfrog (Rana catesbeiana), introduced illegally 37 years ago, can grow to more than 4lbs in weight and almost 2ft long. It consumes other frogs, fish, lizards and even small birds.

See, I almost made it - I mean posting about food in the breakfast thread. :-)

Ecological groups have been warning for years that they must be eliminated to prevent the destruction of indigenous species. Had they been a delicacy for humans, the American interlopers might have been tolerated. Unfortunately for them, they are inedible (even their enormous legs).

Archaeologists in Bulgaria have discovered a previously unknown series of royal tombs from a fabulously wealthy civilisation dating back over 4,000 years.

Excavations inside a group of ancient burial mounds - 80 miles east of the capital, Sofia - are expected to yield up to 100,000 gold artefacts.

So far more than 15,000 gold objects have been unearthed at the site near the village of Dabene - mainly gold beads, originally strung together as spectacular necklaces, and gold hair decorations, all worn as part of the funerary regalia of at least three Bronze Age princesses or princes from around the 23rd century BC.

It is the first time that such a rich, gold-working early Bronze Age tradition has been discovered in the Balkans.

SATURDAY, AUGUST 20, 2005

LONDON There is nothing quite like a good thriller for summer reading and this year's page-turner in Britain might be titled: "The Mystery of the Disappearing Prime Minister."

The plot so far: After weathering the July bombings and announcing a slew of antiterrorism measures, Tony Blair, Britain's prime minister, has headed out on vacation.

Usually at this time of the year , the British press lampoons Blair for accepting freebie vacations at the homes of such rich and famous people as Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy in Sardinia or Sir Cliff Richards, a singer, in Barbados.

This year, though, there is silence.

Bold is mine, I just love it. Sounds so Harry Potter.

OATS have traditionally never enjoyed the sexiest image. But today even the most stylish and faddish foodie will happily admit to starting the day with a bowl of porridge.

...
Together with funding from the Princes Trust, Stone bought a hip-looking stainless steel trailer, several sackfuls of organic oats, and took his Porridge Bar to the streets. He began trading in June at Leith Market, and sold 200 bowls-to-go on his first day.

...
Stone sells his porridge in small (8oz) medium (10oz) or large (12oz) bowls, with a pot of basic salted porridge starting at £1.40, and a bowl of porridge with Scotch Whisky and honey topping the price list at £2.80. Not the cheapest snack, some might say, but what price a healthy heart?

Faster than a speeding calculator, more powerful than a word processor, able to repeat long lists of numbers in a single bound...it's a bird, it's a plane, no, it's Germany's memory Olympics champion - Clemens Mayer.

Most people can't remember where they put their car keys the night before, much less a list of 1,040 numbers. But 20-year-old Clemens Mayer, an aspiring law student, just rattled them off like a grocery list at Germany's memory Olympics, held over the weekend.

Forget Me Not - How to win the U.S. memory championship.

To attain the rank of grand master of memory, you must be able to perform three seemingly superhuman feats. You have to memorize 1,000 digits in under an hour, the precise order of 10 shuffled decks of playing cards in the same amount of time, and one shuffled deck in less than two minutes. There are 36 grand masters of memory in the world. Only one lives in the United States. His name is Scott Hagwood, and he's won every U.S. Memory Championship since he began competing in 2001. This past Saturday he was at home in Fayettville, N.C., putting the finishing touches on his first book about memory enhancement. That meant he was not in the auditorium on the 19th floor of the Con-Edison headquarters in Manhattan, and that meant that for the first time in five years, the gold medal of the eighth annual U.S. Memory Championship was anyone's for the taking.

And if you need some ideas on what to memorize, besides the birthday of your spouse or the date of your wedding - here some ideas:

Creighton Carvello - Memory feats and memory world records

Well, this is it for now, hope there is enough food for thought for this breakfast buffet.

My friend climbed to the top but I was too chicken as the tower wasn't in such good shape.  

Pax

Night and day you can find me Flogging the Simian

A historic stone symbolising Swiss national unity has been stolen from a hotel in the central Swiss city of Interlaken where it was on display.
The 80kg (165lb) stone, called Unspunnenstein, had already been stolen once in 1984, by an underground group from the francophone region of Jura.

The group has not made an outright claim this time, but issued a statement in support of the theft of the boulder.

It was to be the centrepiece of a festival due to take place next month.

The festival would have marked the stone's bicentenary.

...
A separatist movement, known as Belier, later issued a statement saying: "It is obvious the Unspunnen stone is again in Jurassian hands."

The group would like a part of the Jura hills which is still under the jurisdiction of the German-speaking Bern canton to be integrated into the francophone Jura canton.

Well, at least this time they are not using bombs.

European Hockey Dublin, Ireland

Three of my favorite players are Fatima Moreira de Melo, Leontine Voskamp and Minke Smabers, from their days as youthful hockey players at their clubs Victoria - Rotterdam, HCKZ and HDM in The Hague.

<click on pic for more>

NOS SPORT Video coverage of the games

~~~

'Sapere aude'

Lime juice, creamy yoghurt with honey...

Hmmm, not doing too well so far.

oh well, never mind

Once I get back in shape I'll start to look through some papers of geo-strategic aspects of oil that might form basis of my first diary...

London House Prices Fall, Prompting U.K. Slowdown, Buyer Bribes

Aug. 16 (Bloomberg) -- Christian Holland, a fund manager at Cavendish Asset Management in London, set the asking price for his three-bedroom house in the southwest of the U.K. capital at 519,000 pounds ($940,000). Four months and two price cuts later, he's happy to accept an even lower offer.

``It's for 450,000 and I'm taking it,'' says Holland, 37, of the single bid he's received. ``The market is dreadful.''

London house prices, which more than tripled in the 10 years through June 2004, are falling, and they may bring a halt to the U.K.'s economic expansion under Prime Minister Tony Blair. Countrywide Plc, Britain's largest real estate company, has closed offices and cut its workforce. Developers such as George Wimpey Plc and Taylor Woodrow Plc are offering soccer tickets and property tax payments to entice new sales.

Now to look forward cooking dinner for the in-laws.