… Finally Friday …
October 19th 2007

A view of a painting uncovered at Djade al-Mughara Neolihic site,
northeast of the Syrian city of Aleppo, in this September 2007 handout
photo. The painting was discovered by a team of French archaeologists,
who described the painting as the oldest in the world.

Gather ye Rosebuds while ye may
Tue Oct 16, 9:47 AM ET
It won only one Oscar, but Orson Welles' 1941 film \"Citizen Kane\" is widely considered his best movie. Now the Academy
Award Welles received for his masterwork can be bought for a cool million -- or maybe more.
Sotheby's said it will auction off the statuette Welles won for screenwriting with Herman Mankiewicz on December 11. The
auctioneer estimates it could fetch between $800,000 and $1.2 million for the Oscar given to Welles by the Academy of Motion
Picture Arts and Sciences.
The Oscar has almost as tangled a past as the film's protagonist, Charles Foster Kane. The award was believed to have been
lost until it surfaced at another Sotheby's auction in 1994 after being held in secrecy by a Los Angeles cinematographer who
once worked with Welles and received it from him as payment.
Welles' youngest daughter, Beatrice, sued Sotheby's and the cinematographer and eventually claimed the Oscar. When she
tried to sell it, the academy sued her as part of its longstanding goal of keeping Oscars off commercial markets.
Since 1950, the academy has required Oscar-winners to give it the first right of refusal to buy back an Oscar for $1. Because
this particular Oscar had been given before 1950, among other reasons, Welles was able to prevail in court.
In 2003, Welles sold the Oscar to the Dax Foundation, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit group that supports various
educational, health and other causes. Dax is auctioning the Oscar.
Dunbar said Welles' Oscar is hard to value because so few from classic or iconic movies come on the market.
In 1999, the best picture Oscar for \"Gone With the Wind\" sold for more than $1.5 million and Vivien Leigh's best actress
statuette for the same movie fetched more than $550,000.

Real Flying Saucer Eyed by Defense Dept.
Discovery News
Oct. 12, 2007 —
Think \"flying saucer\" and UFOs or 1950s B movies come to mind (see \"Earth vs. the Flying
Saucers\" or \"The Day the Earth Stood Still\"). But now researchers have built an unmanned aerial
vehicle that looks and acts like the imagined thing.The disc-shaped device can take off vertically
from any surface, land practically anywhere, and if it accidentally contacts a building or cliff, it
won't explode into a fireball, like those rascally helicopters.These features could make the
aircraft uniquely suited to flying in urban war zones, aiding with search and rescue in disaster
areas, inspecting crops and pipelines, and taking aerial photographs (read: surveillance).\"You
can take it down to a foot in diameter and we are told it is fully scaleable up to a large-sized
craft,\" said David Steel, director of GFS Projects in Peterborough, England.

The proof is in the absinthe
Formerly banned liquor returns with fanfare
Posted: Oct. 14, 2007
Absinthe makes the heart grow fonder. Or so one might believe, considering the buzz over its return to legal status after
95 years of exile.
Welcome back the opaque green liquor with a back story as cloudy as its pour.
Or rather, it's back in some places: New York, New Jersey, a few bars in California and a couple spots in Chicago.
They're the first to sample a new, legal absinthe, Lucid Absinthe Superieure (left), released this year as part of a slow and
theatrical roll-out that could bring the mystical drink to Wisconsin in the first half of 2008.
\"I've actually tried it with Red Bull, and it's quite good,\" said Anastasia Smith, general manager for Lumen, a club in
Chicago's up-and-coming meatpacking district that plans to debut Lucid during a masquerade event on Halloween.
Smith said Lucid tasted like licorice and numbed her tongue ever so slightly.
She's counting on the 124-proof liquor to be a hit, if only for the mystique of having been legally unavailable in the country
for nearly a century.
Absinthe gets its distinctive flavor from the herbs anise and fennel, with which it is distilled, and its name from a third herb
called grande wormwood (Artemisia absinthium), which contains the compound thujone.
The amount of thujone, once considered to cause hallucinations or epilepsy, is regulated in the United States.
Lucid's maker, Viridian Spirits of New York, found a way to distill Lucid so that it contains less than 10 parts per million of
thujone, which the government considers thujone-free.
JS Oline

10/10/2007 9:54:00 PM
Georgia's `Mansion Madam' Pleads Guilty
A woman accused of running a brothel out of her million-dollar, suburban Atlanta home, pleaded guilty to prostitution and cocaine
possession Wednesday while more serious charges were dropped, her attorney said.
Lisa Ann Taylor, 43, the so-called \"Mansion Madam,\" also pleaded guilty to keeping a house of prostitution and was sentenced to
seven years of probation.
Prosecutors said the exotic dancer who advertised under the name Melissa Wolf charged men to have sex with her and other women
at her home at the Sugarloaf Country Club in Duluth. An entire weekend cost $10,000, District Attorney Danny Porter said.
He said the brothel's customers included doctors, lawyers and businessmen, and that Taylor and her friends used a Web site to offer
their services during visits to Boston, New York, Chicago and suburban Milwaukee.
The Web site showed Taylor sprawled topless on an ottoman and advertising services ranging from $300 one-hour photo shoots to
\"dream dates\" that included a one-hour show.
Taylor, a former Penthouse Pet of the Month, was arrested early this year and charged with prostitution, conspiracy and
racketeering.
Taylor was arrested a second time in September after she was found with prescription drugs and cocaine, authorities said.
One of Taylor's lawyers, Mark Issa, said the most serious charges against her were dropped, including racketeering. Taylor also was
fined $150,000 and must sell her $1.2 million, red-brick mansion.
The prosecutor said the fine is roughly equivalent to money he believes she earned from running a brothel.

Legalize all drugs: chief constable demands end to 'immoral laws' Langton
Published: 15 October 2007
One of Britain's most senior police officers is to call for all drugs – including heroin and cocaine – to be
legalized and urges the Government to declare an end to the \"failed\" war on illegal narcotics.
Richard Brunstrom, the Chief Constable of North Wales, advocates an end to UK drug policy based on
\"prohibition\". His comments come as the Home Office this week ends the process of gathering expert
advice looking at the next 10 years of strategy.
In his radical analysis, which he will present to the North Wales Police Authority today, Mr Brunstrom
points out that illegal drugs are now cheaper and more plentiful than ever before.
The number of users has soared while drug-related crime is rising with narcotics now supporting a
worldwide business empire second only in value to oil. \"If policy on drugs is in future to be pragmatic not
moralistic, driven by ethics not dogma, then the current prohibitionist stance will have to be swept away
as both unworkable and immoral, to be replaced with an evidence-based unified system (specifically
including tobacco and alcohol) aimed at minimization of harms to society,\" he will say.
The demand will not find favor in Downing Street. In his conference speech this year, Gordon Brown
signaled an intensification of the existing battle. \"We will send out a clear message that drugs are never
going to be decriminalized,\" the Prime Minister told the party.
The Independent

Naked chocolate Jesus rises again
Oct 17, 12:38 PM ET
A life-size chocolate sculpture of a naked Jesus will finally be displayed in New York starting in late October, seven
months after an outcry by Roman Catholics forced a different gallery to cancel its exhibition.
The chocolate Jesus will be joined by sculptures of several fully clothed saints, but the Catholic League for Religious and
Civil Rights said it will not protest because, unlike before, there are no plans to put the \"anatomically correct\" Jesus in
public view during Holy Week.
The Proposition gallery in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood will present \"Chocolate Saints ... Sweet Jesus,\" an
exhibition timed to coincide with All Saints' Day on November 1. The show will run October 27 to November 24.
Back in March, the chocolate Jesus by artist Cosimo Cavallaro was to be exhibited in a street-level window of the Roger
Smith Lab Gallery in Midtown Manhattan, giving casual passers-by a view of Jesus's private parts.
Protests, including a call to boycott the affiliated Roger Smith Hotel, forced the gallery to scrap the showing.
The flap recalled another New York clash between art and religion. In 1999, then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani tried to withdraw
a grant from the Brooklyn Museum of Art over a painting depicting the Virgin Mary as a black woman splattered with
elephant dung and adorned with cut-outs from pornographic magazines.

Archbishop apologizes for giving Communion to gays dressed as nuns
San Francisco Chronical
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
(10-16) 21:58 PDT San Francisco -- It was a typical Sunday Mass until two men in heavy
makeup and nuns' habits received Holy Communion from San Francisco's top Catholic
official.
On Oct. 7, Archbishop George Niederauer delivered the Eucharist to members of the Sisters
of Perpetual Indulgence - an activist group whose motto is \"go forth and sin some more\" -
prompting cries of outrage from conservatives across the country and Catholics in San
Francisco.
In response to a request for comment, Niederauer released a letter of apology addressed to
\"Catholics of the Archdiocese of San Francisco and to Catholics at large\" in which he said
he did not realize his mistake until after the Mass at Most Holy Redeemer Church in the
Castro district.
\"At Communion time, toward the end of the line, two strangely dressed persons came to
receive Communion,\" Niederauer wrote. \"As I recall, one of them wore a large flowered hat
or garland.\"
Niederauer said that although he was familiar with the group because its actions had been
condemned by his predecessors, he had never encountered any of the group's members
until that Sunday.
……………….. continued next page

\"These two people have long made a practice of mocking the Catholic Church in general and
religious women in particular. Someone who dresses in a mock religious habit to attend Mass
does so to make a point (that) was intended as a provocative gesture,\" he said in the letter,
which will be published in this Friday's issue of Catholic San Francisco, a diocesan newspaper.
The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, founded in San Francisco in 1979, are known for their white
face paint, outrageous costumes, theatrics and support of the gay community. They adopt
names such as Sister Chastity Boner and Sister Constance Craving of the Holey Desire and
have mottos such as, \"It is not wise to say no to free drinks, cheap jewelry, discount cosmetics
or pretty boys.\"
Sister Barbi Mitzvah, who serves as \"Board Chairnun\" and \"Sexytary,\" said Tuesday that the
group is \"not offering a comment.
\"These people are always after us,\" Sister Mitzvah said, referring to conservative pundits and
Catholic leaders.
The group did not identify the two members who took the wafers. One of the men, however, sent
an e-mail to the church after the Mass and gave the name \"Sister Delta Goodhand.\"

Pics of the Week

That’s The Swastikas, a Canadian girls’ hockey team from Edmonton circa 1916.
Before it became associated with the Nazis, swastikas had been used for hundreds
of years as a symbol of good luck and prosperity:

Car of the Week

Gemballa Porsche Carrera Mirage GT
Around 1500 of Porsche's prestige product, the Carrera GT, have been built, all of which have now been
sold. Owners worried about the individuality of their vehicle, in spite of its rareness, would be well-advised
to make an appointment with Gemballa.
The Carrera GT engine is a dream. A meaty 5.7-litre V10 boasting 612 horsepower.
The Mirage GT is an impressive example of Gemballa's capability, and represents high-end tuning at its
best. The cost of the comprehensive conversion, which can only be carried out by Gemballa, starts from
EUR 229,800 / $325,705.

Weapon of the Week

CheyTac M200 408 cal

Cats & Dogs

A Look Inside a British Bar

A Look Inside a Swedish Bar