R.I.P. - Roger Perry

I'm with you there!

R.I.P. - Tab Hunter

R.I.P. - Steve Ditko

I thought it funny because that was my mom's frig!
................................................................................
My nephew has this story about grabbing his leftover
Spaghetti for work and at lunch time putting it in the
microwave to heat it up at lunch time at work and
when he came back he had half a tub of hot melted
margarine for his lunch?

Yeah,and keep your pant up!

I rarely get into any surveys,(stupid sample cube)
So I find them all bad surveys?!?

Leonardo DiCaprio

R.I.P. - Daniel Pilon

R.I.P. - Harlan Ellison

The search for D.B. Cooper:
Investigators say they've confirmed skyjacker's identity
by decoding long-lost 'confession'




A team of cold-case investigators claim they’ve decoded a 1972 message by D.B. Cooper — and that it contains a confession from Vietnam veteran Robert Rackstraw, long suspected of being the infamous skyjacker.

The letter was addressed to “The Portland Oregonian Newspaper.”

Months earlier, a man identified as the fictitious Cooper had hijacked a Seattle-bound flight and later parachuted out of a plane with $200,000, never to be heard from again.

“This letter is too (sic) let you know I am not dead but really alive and just back from the Bahamas, so your silly troopers up there can stop looking for me. That is just how dumb this government is. I like your articles about me but you can stop them now. D.B. Cooper is not real,” it reads.

“I want out of the system and saw a way through good ole Unk,” he writes. “Now it is Uncle’s turn to weep and pay one of it’s own some cash for a change. (And please tell the lackey cops D.B. Cooper is not my real name).”
Television and film producer Tom Colbert — who’s led a team of about 40 private investigators in the search for Cooper — said he received the letter after successfully suing the FBI for the Cooper files.

“No one even knew about this letter,” Colbert told the Daily News. “When I got it, I noticed it was typed just like (a different Cooper letter), so I called a code breaker and showed it to him. He said, ‘Tom, you’re not going to believe it, but his confession is in here,'” Colbert said.

Rick Sherwood, a former member of the Army Security Agency — which deciphers signals — said he spotted four phrases or words that were repeated throughout the note, including “D.B. Cooper is not real,” “Uncle” or “Unk” referring to Uncle Sam, “the system,” and “lackey cops.”

“D.B. Cooper” and “lackey cops” appeared in the same sentence, “as did “Unk” and “the system,” suggesting to Sherwood that the coded messages could be contained in those sentences.

He decoded “through good ole Unk” to mean “by skyjacking a jet plane,” using a system of letters and numbers.

“And please tell the lackey cops” was decoded to mean “I am 1st LT Robert Rackstraw,” according to Colbert.

Sherwood had deciphered earlier letters from Cooper and had become familiar with his writing style.
“I read it two or three times and said, ‘This is Rackstraw, this is what he does,’” Sherwood told the Daily News.

“I noticed he kept on repeating words in his sentences and thought he had a code in there somewhere. He was taunting like he normally does and I thought his name was going to be in it and sure enough the numbers added up perfectly,” he said.

He said the entire decoding process took him a couple weeks.

“I was definitely shocked his name was in there. That’s what I was looking for and everything added up to that,” he said.

An earlier letter, addressed to four different newspapers, contained hidden identifiers — including his military units — that pointed to Rackstraw, now 74 and living in the San Diego area. Rackstraw, who could not be reached for comment, was previously investigated and cleared by authorities of being Cooper, but he remains the most likely suspect in the elusive case.

“Let’s just say we closed the case and this is icing on the cake I didn’t expect, it truly is. We not only had his initials and units in the other letters, but we now have him saying, ‘I am Cooper.’ Rackstraw is a narcissistic sociopath who never thought he would be caught,” Colbert said.

“He was trying to prove that he was smarter than anyone else. But he couldn’t fight 1500 years of brainpower on our team. We beat him. I didn’t expect it, but it’s the icing.”

R.I.P. - Joe Jackson

R.I.P. - Rick 'Old Man' Harrison

R.I.P. - Vinnie Paul

R.I.P. - KoKo

Archaeologists excavated the burial site, in the ancient Chinese capital city of Chang’an, now part of modern Xi'an, in 2004. “I'm afraid we don't know much about the tomb,” said Helen Chatterjee, a biology professor at the University College London and a co-author of the study, published in Science, that describes the gibbon. The tomb is about 2,300 or 2,200 years old, and is possibly the final resting place of Lady Xia, grandmother of the Qin dynasty's first emperor.
The tomb contained several dead exotic animals in 12 pits, including a leopard and a bear, befitting a member of the ancient Chinese elite. Among these remains, excavators found a small jawbone and skull with prominent canine teeth. The gibbon bones wound up in a museum drawer, until Samuel Turvey, at the Zoological Society of London, plucked them out of obscurity.

“It's just luck that Sam found this specimen and immediately suspected it was a gibbon,” Chatterjee said.

Turvey scanned the gibbon bones and sent the images to Chatterjee. With their students, the scientists began to pick apart the gibbon's features. Their analysis “revealed it to be significantly different from living gibbons,” Chatterjee said.
Junzi imperialis had a steeper forehead than other gibbons, narrower cheekbones and more slender brow ridges, said Alejandra Ortiz, an anthropologist at Arizona State University and a co-author of the report. Its molars were unusually sized, too.

All of these features combined, the authors say, make a strong case that the gibbon is not just a new species but a new genus. (A genus, you'll recall, ranks above a species — it's the Homo in Homo sapiens.) Living gibbons are split into 20 species over four genera.

“There’s good reason to believe this represents a new species of gibbon,” said anthropologist Paul Garber, a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois who has studied gibbons in China and was not involved with this report. Whether it's a new genus is tough to say, he said, based on one specimen.

What's more critical, in Garber's mind, is the gibbon's extinction.

In China, wild gibbons stick to the dense forest canopies of the southwest. One species, the Hainan gibbons, lives at the nation's southernmost point; there are only 30 of these apes left, making them one of the rarest mammals alive. The Chang’an tomb, in the central province of Shaanxi, is 750 miles from the nearest known gibbon habitat. Shaanxi is mountainous, Garber said, and though macaques and snub-nosed monkeys live there, no gibbons do.

It's possible, Ortiz said, that “Lady Xia’s gibbon was transported to Chang’an as a trade item or tribute.” (Ortiz pointed to old Chinese texts referring to the animals as “elegant” and symbols of “gentlemen.”) But the study authors say Junzi imperialis could have been a local. Except for the gibbon, the other mammals found in the tomb still occur in Shaanxi.
“Gibbons had much wider ranges in the past,” Chatterjee said. She added: “It is unlikely specimens such as Junzi would have traveled this far just by humans.” Chatterjee and her colleagues suspect there are more Junzi bones in the area, waiting to be found. “We are keen to find them.”

The scientists cannot say with certainty humans wiped the gibbons off the planet. They just think it's the most likely hypothesis. (The current study of this species, after all, depended on its cultural value to long-dead humans.) And, though we might think of ecological loss as a modern problem, ancient Chang’an had a dense human population. "We have been a threat for quite a while," Ortiz said.

“Probably more than any country in the world, China has transformed its landscape,” Garber said. Two thousand years ago, the Han dynasty had an estimated population of 60 million people, a quarter of the world's total.

Primate habitats shrank dramatically in China over the past two millennia. In September, Garber published a paper based on historical records of snub-nosed monkeys, taken from texts as old as zero A.D. As the population of China boomed from the 1700s onward, references to snub-nosed monkeys in eastern and central China vanished completely.

Gibbons, who consume mostly fruits, are especially ill-equipped for shrinking forests. Because they rarely descend from the canopy, when forests splinter, the apes remain boxed in. Their ability to cross open gaps to between habitats, Ortiz said, is "extremely limited."

“The Junzi find is a sobering lesson in the devastating effects that humans can have on the natural world,” Chatterjee said. “Nature cannot keep up.”

The primate vanishing act has not stopped with Junzi. “Unless things dramatically change over the next 25 to 75 years, there will be a major primate extinction crisis,” Garber said. “Worldwide, 60 percent of primates are threatened, endangered or critically endangered.”

China still has the opportunity to enact better policies that protect living primates, he said. But that window won't stay open forever.

"no"....I know what I spent

Cable service or streaming service

R.I.P. - Big Van Vader

I wasn't watching my point total either but now
that you say that I will have to look at the before
and after to see?
Because I have two other sites where the 2 to 6
DQ-points seem to mount up quickly even without
keeping track of them,
I would now rate them as #1 and #2 where as they
used to be below a #10 rating where as here it
used to be a #1 and is now rate like a #12 site?
They keep spouting Change and I hope for the
best for us but it only ever seems to be getting
better for them?

Weezer - Africa