by Ian Punnett

It’s only a few seconds long but it’s an amazing movie.  Unfortunately, we already know the ending.  YouTube has a high-quality film that contains the only known moving image of Anne Frank.

news.aol.com/article/youtube-shows-video...

 No 3-D, no soundtrack but still very captivating.

Toy Story 3-D comes highly recommended to me and speaking of great soundtracks, it’s just another reason to see “Zombieland.”

So how much fun was “Zombieland”?  Not as awesomely great as “Shaun of the Dead,” in my opinion, the movie which set the standard for gross-out, horror comedy.  But just like “Shaun of the Dead,” “Zombieland” is very tongue-in-cheek--and the tongue stuck in the cheek came from the mouth of the dead guy on the ground.  It’s clever, it rarely drags and it has the best surprise in the middle and a gag that’s funny enough to wait around after the credits at the end.

Fresh off a crush on the recently married indie idol Zooey Deschanel, my 16-year-old is now smitten by the gun-toting Emma Stone.  A hot teenage girl who loves to kill zombies as much as he does; my kid didn’t stand a chance.

Neither do the zombies in “Zombieland.”  See it before somebody tells you too much about it.

It’ll be fun to take your mind off your troubles.

And there are troubles in the world.

(CNN) -- Typhoon Parma slammed into the already storm-battered Philippines on Saturday afternoon, forcing tens of thousands of people to flee their homes for safer shelter.

 As many as 4,000 people could be buried under the rubble in the aftermath of the devastating earthquakes in Indonesia, United Nations officials said Saturday.

Authorities arrested a man accused of secretly taping ESPN sports reporter Erin Andrews in the nude and posting the videos on the Internet, the FBI said Friday.

A CBS producer, Robert "Joe" Halderman, has been charged with first-degree attempted grand larceny; officials said he threatened to go public with the 62-year-old funnyman's dalliances unless Letterman paid $2 million.

Mr. Halderman’s lawyer, Gerald L. Shargel, said his client denied wrongdoing.

“He pled not guilty, and he stands by that plea,” Mr. Shargel said after the arraignment in a telephone interview. “My position is that, even upon a superficial glance, there is another side of this story and I’m working on it.”

Yeah, I bet he’s working on it.  He hasn’t come up with another believable side to the story yet but he’s working on it!

What’s the other side of this story?

VISITORS to a remote grotto have claimed a statue wept and crosses appeared and disappeared in the night sky this week.

A group of 14 people, who had gathered at the statue of the Virgin Mary, in a rocky outcrop near the town of Dungloe in Ireland on Tuesday night, were transfixed as they watched the phenomenon, which they said lasted almost an hour.

"It was a crazy evening. It was absolutely amazing. I am still on an emotional high. All but one person seemed to see the same thing," recalled James Boyle who was at the site with his wife and children.

The Kerrytown shrine is visited by thousands of pilgrims annually, after first becoming the subject of a religious apparition 70 years ago.

James explained how the group had been drawn there last Tuesday night because of a claim by a faith healer that the Virgin Mary had told him in a channelled message that she would appear at the shrine on September 29 at 8pm.

"We went into the shelter facing the rock and at a few minutes to eight someone suggested we should start the rosary. We had no sooner started than someone shouted 'look up'.

"To the left of the cross, another cross appeared in the sky and as soon as it disappeared, another one appeared. It lasted about 10 minutes," he explained.

Then people began noticing that the white statue with its red heart had begun changing colour and form.

"She appeared to have a human face and her head turned and she looked at people. She looked down at the children who were at the front," he said.

One woman explained how the statue began crying and she went up to dry the tears.

"The tears were running down from her eyes," she told Highland Radio.

. . . And then the statue started crying so hard that the Virgin Mary’s mascara was running and she had these big snot bubbles coming from her nose.

Is it possible?  I guess.  You know what seems impossible?  That not one person had a cell phone camera.  They’re everywhere.  Now, that would have been cool.

Not that I don’t believe.  You might not be a believer but I am.  Turns out, I have the brain for it:

(Wired) Brain scans of people who believe in God have found further evidence that religion involves neurological regions vital for social intelligence.

In other words, whether or not God or Gods exist, religious belief may have been quite useful in shaping the human mind’s evolution.

“The main point is that all these brain regions are important for other forms of social cognition and behavior,” said Jordan Grafman, a National Institutes of Health cognitive scientist.

In a study published Monday in Public Library of Science ONE, Grafman’s team used an MRI to measure the brains areas in 40 people of varying degrees of religious belief.

People who reported an intimate experience of God, engaged in religious behavior or feared God, tended to have larger-than-average brain regions devoted to empathy, symbolic communication and emotional regulation. The research wasn’t trying to measure some kind of small “God-spot,” but looked instead at broader patterns within the brains of self-reported religious people.

Grafman suspects that the origins of divine belief reside in mechanisms that evolved in order to help primates understand family members and other animals. “We tried to use the same social mechanisms to explain unusual phenomena in the natural world,” he said.

I wonder how big the brain patterns were in that 5-year-old boy who took on a 12 foot, 800 pound alligator and won?

The Houston Chronicle reports that Simon Hughes, 5, killed the second largest alligator in Texas history back in September in a marshy section of his family's ranch about an hour north of Houston. "Everything out on our ranch will either bite you or stick you," Simon's father, Scott Hughes, told Fox 26 News in Houston.

At first glance, it wasn't a fair fight. Simon weighs 40 pounds, The alligator weighed as much as a Harley Davidson motorcycle. However, the boy's single-barrel .410-gauge shotgun leveled the playing field. Simon told Fox News he planted a load of buckshot right behind the critter's eyes. (www.parentdish.com)

Meanwhile, there is an adult who looks like they lost a battle with an alligator whose happy to have arms back.  Not his arms, just anybody’s:

(telegraph UK)  Jeff Kepner, an American father who had a double arm transplant, has spoken of his joy at the operation's success but says that he has been left with hands hairier than his body.

The former pastry chef lost his hands more than a decade ago due to a bacterial infection, but is now looking forward to returning home to his family in Augusta, Georgia.

Kepner became the first American to undergo a double hand transplant in May, since when he has been recuperating at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

Yesterday he revealed how he was coping with his new limbs, explaining that he still lacks sensation but is learning to grip and pick up small items.

"I'm not the kind of person to say 'Ooh, those aren't mine'," he told the Daily Mirror.

"From the beginning I thought, 'These look pretty darn good'. The donor was hairier than I am but I feel like they've always been on my arms.”

That would be weird for me too.  I’m a very hairless man and I don’t know how long it would take me to get used to seeing black hair on my arms.

I guess I could always shave my arms. With my toes.

www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/62...

Anyway, it’s always cool to the see the latest that doctors can do--and what doctors can’t do.

The devastation of the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic is well known, but a new article suggests a surprising factor in the high death toll: the misuse of aspirin. Appearing in the November 1 issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases and available online now, the article sounds a cautionary note as present day concerns about the novel H1N1 virus run high.

High aspirin dosing levels used to treat patients during the 1918-1919 pandemic are now known to cause, in some cases, toxicity and a dangerous build up of fluid in the lungs, which may have contributed to the incidence and severity of symptoms, bacterial infections, and mortality. Additionally, autopsy reports from 1918 are consistent with what we know today about the dangers of aspirin toxicity, as well as the expected viral causes of death.

The motivation behind the improper use of aspirin?

 In 1918, physicians did not fully understand either the dosing or pharmacology of aspirin, yet they were willing to recommend it. Its use was promoted by the drug industry, endorsed by doctors wanting to "do something," and accepted by families and institutions desperate for hope.  (physorg.com)

Here’s something better than medicine.  I know these two little girls, Safir and Lotus, daughters of a friend of mine, who came to visit us last summer from Denmark.  It’s an annual trip from their mother and her husband, one of the top three rock star photographers in the world.  

Anyway, they couldn’t be cuter.  He’s a shot of them on my scooter, Safir in front, from just before the leaves started turning.

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

And not matter what kind of night or week you’re having, or how bleak the news looks, you’ll love this little existential story. Earlier this year, Lotus, the little one, was intently eating an ice cream (a rare treat). Then she said something that her mother wasn’t sure she had heard right, so she asked her to repeat it. Lotus said quietly, “The ice cream doesn’t know that it is me that’s eating it.”

The ice cream does now, Lotus, the ice cream does now.