by Ian Punnett

 

I was just talking about this on the radio and I had to put it somewhere for you to see it, so here's the video of a spider crawling all over the pope:

OK, let’s play “Murder She Wrote.”  For some reason, no police agency has been willing to call the death of U.S. Census worker Bill Sparkman a murder.  Let’s review the known testimony.

In Big Creek, Ky, near the lovely Daniel Boone National Forest where I once spent the night, about halfway between Lexington, Ky and Knoxville, TN, in Appalachia (that I love), the 51-year-old, part-time census worker found hanging in a rural Kentucky cemetery was naked, gagged.

Police have been holding out the possibility that Bill Sparkman’s death could have been a suicide or an accident even though had his feet and hands had been bound with duct tape.

Authorities have also said the word "fed" was scrawled with a felt-tip pen across 51-year-old Bill Sparkman's chest but they are unwilling to say whether or not he was a victim of anti-government bias or even if the killer, if there is one, was aware that Sparkman worked for the U.S. Census even though his U.S. Census identification tag was found taped to his head and neck.

Jerry Weaver of Fairfield, Ohio, told The Associated Press on Friday that he was among a group of relatives who made the gruesome discovery on Sept. 12.

"The only thing he had on was a pair of socks," Weaver said. "And they had duct-taped his hands, his wrists. He had duct tape over his eyes, and they gagged him with a red rag or something."

"And they even had duct tape around his neck.”

The scene left Weaver without a doubt how Sparkman died.

"He was murdered," he said. "There's no doubt."

Weaver said the body was about 50 yards from a 2003 Chevrolet S-10 pickup truck. He said Sparkman's clothes were in the bed of the truck.

"His tailgate was down," Weaver said. "I thought he could have been killed somewhere else and brought there and hanged up for display, or they actually could have killed him right there. It was a bad, bad scene."

"It took me three or four good nights to sleep. My 20-year-old daughter ended up sleeping in the floor in our bedroom." he said.

So how could any investigating agency argue that “This is the worst case of suicide that I’ve ever seen!”

There must be a reason--Shaggy and Scooby wouldn’t even need Velma to determine a cause of death:  Murder in the worst degree.  How sad for his family. O, fellowship divine! We feebly struggle, they in glory shine; for all are one in thee, for all are thine. Alleluia, Alleluia!

So that having been settled, what could have been the motive?  Anti-census paranoia, misplaced anti-government craziness, Sparkman’s accidental discovery of a meth lab or drug distribution point, perhaps a mistaken belief that this part-time census taker, teacher and family man was somehow a secret revenue agent who came across some old-timer’s still?  Like the song says, some people never came back from “Copperhead Road.”

The motive alone remains a mystery for now, I believe, and I fear that the longer it takes, the harder it will be to find the killers in all those hills and hollers of that beautiful, ancient landscape.  

Remember the Panama Monster mystery from last week?  

fm1071.com/show_elements/link.php?entryI...

Well, I wish I had a bigger update for you but here goes.  According to many of my favorite bloggers, the creature in question is some kind of animal, not an alien.  As much as I would love to report to you that it turned out to be Jar Jar Binks, Loren Coleman’s “Cryptomundo” is clearly coming down on the side that the Panama Monster is a newborn or perhaps diseased animal of unknown origin for now. I think it looks like a kind of sloth of which there are many in Central America but “quien sabe?”

Loren Coleman did have a photo of the decomposing carcass, however, maybe it's the "monster":

I’ll give you an update soon on the radio.

By the way:

The shower radio has been named the worst household gadget of all time.

It faced stiff competition from the electric nail file and electric candles which made up the top three.

In a survey of 3,000 women carried out by an insurance company the shower radio was revealed to have a host of design flaws.

Perhaps most unforgivably it let in water while its tinny sound quality was often not heard above the din of the water.  (Metro UK)

I agree, I’ve never had any luck with shower radios!  I gave them as presents the year they first started becoming popular and everybody hated them.  Which got me to wondering whether C. Crane has ever done a shower--they do everything else right.

Son of a gun, there it is, right there in their catalogue:

www.ccrane.com/radios/am-fm-radios/sange...

“The world's first ‘serious’ water resistant radio. The Sangean H201 doesn't sound tinny and hollow like other shower radios you might have tried. You can hang it from your shower head by its curved, tracked, quirky handle that folds into the unit, or you can opt for the (included) wall-mounted bracket.”

Either way, I’m ordering one and I hope you get one too.

Don’t call me if you’re naked, though. That would make two of us and that would be weird.

Speaking of great inventions.  Remember a few weeks ago when researchers claimed to able to tell the year that early human migration from Africa started?  Egyptologists are doing that one better:

The Egyptians started building the Great Pyramid of Giza on August 23, 2470 B.C., according to controversial new research that attempts to place an exact date on the start of the ancient construction project.

A team of Egyptian researchers arrived at the date based on calculations of historical appearances of the star Sothis—today called Sirius.

Every year around the time of the Nile River floods, Sothis would rise in the early morning sky after a long absence.

"The appearance of this star indicates the beginning of an inundation period" for the Nile, said team the former head of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities.

Throughout their history, "Egyptians … started their main buildings, the tombs, and the temples at the beginning of the inundation"—an auspicious time, since floodwaters brought fresh soil, maintaining the region's fertility.

In addition, pharaohs always started building their tombs at the starts of their rules. Khufu, the pharaoh meant to be buried in the Great Pyramid, took power in 2470 B.C., according to Nur El-Din and colleagues.

The researchers therefore compared the modern calendar, the ancient Egyptian calendar, and the cycle of the star to find the exact day Sothis would have appeared that year.  

By the way, I asked, of course, and I was told that August 23, 2470 B.C.E. was a Tuesday.  At least according to one calculator, the pyramids were started on a Tuesday.

Of course, they didn’t called it “Tuesday” in ancient Egypt, it was known as “Tutsday.”

I’m making that up.  I have no idea what it was called but I do know that the Egyptian week used to be ten days.  Glad it’s not like that now.  I think the audience of my weekday radio show is already sick of me by Friday!  The good news for Coast to Coast listeners is that I would only be on three times a month!

(PhysOrg.com) -- Gene therapy holds promise in the treatment of cancer as well as a large number of other diseases. However, developing a scalable system for delivering genes to cells both efficiently and safely has been challenging. Now, two teams of researchers have developed versatile nanotechnology-enabled platforms that could get therapeutic genes safely and efficiently into cancer cells.

In one study, a team of Northwestern University researchers has shown that nanodiamonds can serve as a novel gene delivery technology that combines key enhanced delivery efficiency along with outstanding biocompatibility, all in one drug delivery package.  Said Dean Ho, Ph.D., who led the research. “By harnessing the innate advantages of nanodiamonds, we now have demonstrated their promise for gene therapy.”

If you can’t quite picture how big a nanodiamond is, just look at my wife’s original wedding ring.  It was all I could afford.  Hey, the guy at the pawnshop said she’d love it no matter what.  

I guess he was right because she’s been “Hopelessly Devoted to Me” ever since.  Which reminds me:

GREASE star Olivia Newton-John has revealed that she is fascinated by unidentified flying objects - and has even seen a UFO.

The 60-year-old -star claimed that she spotted a UFO when she was just 15. She said: "I have seen one when I was very young. It was unidentified and it was flying."

The star of “Xanadu” also recalled how the brilliant silver object flew across the sky at "amazing speeds.”

That means it flew almost as fast as I did when I left the theater that was showing “Xanadu.”

By the way, here’s a fun movie fact.  Actor Joe Montegna had small role in “Xanadu” that was left entirely on the cutting room floor.

I wonder how much that cost him . . .