The Loch Ness monster is on vacation in Wisconsin—and state officials want the legendary lady to leave.

Department of Natural Resources spokesman Dan Baumann says a sculpture of Nessie is illegally obstructing the Chippewa River in Eau Claire and must be removed by the person who placed it there.

The sculpture’s creator remains a mystery, although a person who anonymously emailed the Eau Claire Leader-Telegram on Thursday ( http://bit.ly/ILl70C) said it would be removed within 10 days.

Retailer Menards says it would like to acquire the guerrilla art and that the monster could make her home in retention ponds at the home improvement chain’s Eau Claire property.

The Loch Ness monster was first “spotted” at Loch Ness, a waterway some 10 miles south of Inverness, Scotland, in 1933.

Reported by The Associated Press from EAU CLAIRE, Wis.

Read More

A northern Michigan teen put together one sweet prom dress, thanks to the help of classmates who collected thousands of Starburst wrappers for her.

Diane McNease tells WLUC-TV that she came up with the idea of making her prom dress out of candy wrappers when she saw a friend folding some. She estimates it took about 18,000 Starburst wrappers to make the corset of her dress, as well as matching hair bands and a purse.

The Ishpeming High School student wore the dress to Saturday’s prom in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

The top half of the dress is made out of folded wrappers and the bottom looks more like a traditional gown. It took about five months to make, with help from family and friends.

———

Reported by WLUC-TV, http://www.wluctv6.com, from ISHPEMING, Mich.

Read More

Archaeologists have found a small room in Mayan ruins where royal scribes apparently used walls like a blackboard to keep track of astronomical records and the society’s intricate calendar some 1,200 years ago.

The walls reveal the oldest known astronomical tables from the Maya. Scientists already knew they must have been keeping such records at that time, but until now the oldest known examples dated from about 600 years later.

Astronomical records were key to the Mayan calendar, which has gotten some attention recently because of doomsday warnings that it predicts the end of the world this December. Experts say it makes no such prediction. The new finding provides a bit of backup: The calculations include a time span longer than 6,000 years that could extend well beyond 2012.

“Why would they go into those numbers if the world is going to come to an end this year?” observed Anthony Aveni of Colgate University in Hamilton, N.Y., an expert on Mayan astronomy. “You could say a number that big at least suggests that time marches on.”

Aveni, along with William Saturno of Boston University and others, report the discovery in the journal Science.

The room, a bit bigger than 6-feet square, is part of a large complex of Mayan ruins in the rain forest at Xultun in northeastern Guatemala. The walls also contain portraits of a seated king and some other figures, but it’s clear those have no connection to the astronomical writings, the scientists said.

One wall contains a calendar based on phases of the moon, covering about 13 years.

Aveni said it would allow scribes to predict the appearance of a full moon years in advance, for example. Such record-keeping was key to Mayan astrology and rituals, and maybe would be used to advise the king on when to go to war or how good this year’s crops would be, he said.

“‘What you have here is astronomy driven by religion,” he said.

On another wall are numbers indicating four time spans from roughly 935 to 6,700 years. It’s not clear what they represent, but maybe the scribes were doing calculations that combined observations from important astronomical events like the movements of Mars, Venus and the moon, the researchers said.

Why bother to do that? Maybe the scribes were “geeks … who just got carried away with doing these kinds of computations and calculations, and probably did them far beyond the needs of ordinary society,” Aveni suggested.

———

Online:

Journal Science: http://www.sciencemag.org

———

Reported by MALCOM RITTER from the Associated Press. He can be followed at http://www.twitter.com/malcolmritter

Read More

A young male wolf from Oregon that has won worldwide fame while trekking across mountains, deserts and highways looking for a girlfriend has had what appears to be his first close encounter with people, and got his picture taken, to boot.

A federal trapper, a state game warden and a state wildlife biologist were visiting ranchers in Northern California to notify them that GPS signals showed the gray wolf was in the area, when they stopped to look over a sagebrush hillside with binoculars, said Karen Kovacs, wildlife program manager for the California Department of Fish and Game in Redding, Calif.

“There, all of a sudden, out pops a head, and there he is,” she said. “He appeared very healthy.”

The wolf was hanging out with three coyotes, and appeared curious about the people watching him. But he kept his distance, about 100 yards, Kovacs said.

“He has managed to stay off the radar as far as people getting visuals of this critter,” she said. “His healthy distance has probably served him well up to this point.”

In color: California wildlife biologist Richard Shinn snapped a photo, the first shot of the animal in color, and the department posted it on its website.

The sighting happened on private land in Modoc County, the sparsely settled northeastern corner of California.

The wolf, known as OR-7, left the Imnaha pack in northeastern Oregon in September, shortly before the state put a death warrant on his father and a sibling for killing cattle. That order has been suspended while a challenge by conservation groups is heard in court. OR-7 is a descendant of wolves introduced into the Northern Rockies in the 1990s, and represents the westernmost expansion of a regional population that now tops 1,650.

First in California: His travels took him down the Cascade Range and across the border into California in December, making him the first wolf in California in more than 80 years, according to the department. Along the way he was photographed in black and white by an automated trailside camera in Oregon. He has since gone back to Oregon and returned to California, making his first visit to Modoc County.

While his story has appeared in newspapers and websites around the world, OR-7 has yet to find a mate or even settle down since following his natural inclination to leave his home and head out on his own.

“We joked that it only seems right that the world’s most famous wolf makes an appearance in California and the paparazzi come out,” said Rob Klavins of the conservation group Oregon Wild, which held a contest for children around the world to name the wolf and came up with Journey.

Klavins said he views wolf recovery as a “real-life story of redemption.”

“This tells us how far we have come,” he said. “His brother’s story tells us how far we have to go. He was illegally shot in Idaho.”

Kovacs said state biologists have been keeping close tabs on OR-7, with the help of his GPS collar, which is visible in one of the photos taken by Shinn.

Eating well: Biologists have visited areas the wolf frequented after he left and found a track in the dirt in Northern California’s Shasta County. They know he has fed on the carcasses of deer, dug up the burrows of ground squirrels, and fed from livestock carcasses left out by a rancher. But as of yet, there are no reports he has killed any livestock.

The department also has been contacting ranchers to keep them up to date on the general whereabouts of the wolf, which is protected as a federally endangered species in Western Oregon and California.

“Most people have been appreciative,” Kovacs said. “We want to make sure we are doing our part to protect this animal so that it isn’t mistaken for a coyote” and killed.

———

Online:

California Department of Fish and Game, http://1.usa.gov/IWs2pL

Reported by JEFF BARNARD of the Associated Press from GRANTS PASS, Ore.

Read More

Potty humor just got prehistoric. A new study suggests that dinosaurs may have helped keep an already overheated world warmer with their farts and burps 200 million years ago.

The research published  in Current Biology says that large dinosaurs made a significant contribution to the greenhouse effect back then. Study author David Wilkinson estimated that about 570 million tons of methane came from dinosaurs. That’s similar to total atmospheric levels of methane today produced by livestock, farming and industry. Cows alone now produce nearly 100 tons a year of methane.

The study looks at the biggest—and presumably gassiest—dinosaurs, called sauropods. These were the long-necked plant eaters that munched on the top of trees. They were large animals that had food fermenting in their guts for long periods of time because of their giant size, said University of Maryland paleontologist Thomas Holtz, who wasn’t part of the study.

Hotter: Wilkinson said dinosaur gas was just one factor at a time when the world was quite tropical, about 18 degrees warmer than now. But he said some in the media and blogosphere have misinterpreted his study to say it was the main cause of ancient warming. In a phone interview, Wilkinson said it was only one of the causes, but dinosaur gas “is big enough to be a measurable effect.”

What caused the ancient pre-human world to be so hot — just the way the dinosaurs needed it — was a variety of factors. Volcanoes spewed much more greenhouse gases than now, Holtz said. Swamps, water currents, shallow seas and plentiful plankton combined to raise greenhouse gas levels far higher than today, he said.

Outside climate experts say the study makes some sense, but that the warming from dinosaur farts back then is dwarfed by man-made carbon dioxide today from industry.

NASA climate scientist Gavin Schmidt quickly ran some calculations based on Wilkinson’s figures. Dinosaur methane would have hiked temperatures about half a degree, which is a fraction of what’s been caused by the burning of fossil fuels like coal and oil in the 20th Century, he said.

Farted to death? It’s also wrong to suggest the study blames dinosaur flatulence for their extinction, Holtz said. He noted that the sauropods started showing up—and getting gassy—around 200 million years ago and didn’t die off until 65 million years ago.

University of Victoria climate scientist Andrew Weaver said: “Frankly, methane emissions from dinosaur burps is probably not the No. 1 thing we should be concerned about in modern society.”

———

Online:

Current Biology: http://bit.ly/ID1BAt

———

Reported by Seth Borenstein of the Associated Press from WASHINGTON, D.C. He can be followed at http://twitter.com/borenbears

Read More

Maurice Sendak didn’t think of himself as a children’s author, but as an author who told the truth about childhood.

“I like interesting people and kids are really interesting people,” he explained last fall. “And if you didn’t paint them in little blue, pink and yellow, it’s even more interesting.”

Sendak, who died Tuesday in Danbury, Conn., at age 83, four days after suffering a stroke, revolutionized children’s books and how we think about childhood simply by leaving in what so many writers before had excluded. Dick and Jane were no match for his naughty Max. His kids misbehaved and didn’t regret it, and in their dreams and nightmares fled to the most unimaginable places. Monstrous creatures were devised from his studio, but none more frightening than the grownups in his stories.

“From their earliest years children live on familiar terms with disrupting emotions — fear and anxiety are an intrinsic part of their everyday lives, they continually cope with frustrations as best they can,” he said upon receiving the Caldecott Medal in 1964 for “Where the Wild Things Are,” his signature book.

Communities attempted to ban him, but his books sold millions of copies and his curmudgeonly persona became as much a part of his legend as “Where the Wild Things Are,” adapted into a hit movie in 2009. He seemed to act out everyone’s fantasy of a nasty old man with a hidden and generous heart. No one granted the privilege could forget his snarly smile, his raspy, unprintable and adorable dismissals of such modern piffle as e-books and publicity tours, his misleading insistence that his life didn’t matter.

Sendak’s other books, standard volumes in so many children’s bedrooms, included “Chicken Soup With Rice,” ”One was Johnny,” ”Pierre,” ”Outside Over There” and “Brundibar,” a folk tale about two children who need to earn enough money to buy milk for their sick mother.

“This is the closest thing to a perfect child I’ve ever had,” he told the AP.

Besides illustrating his own work, he also provided drawings — sometimes sweet, sometimes nasty — for Else Holmelund Minarik’s series “Little Bear,” George MacDonald’s “The Light Princess” and adaptations of E.T.A. Hoffman’s “The Nutcracker” and the Brothers Grimm’s “King Grisly-Beard.” His most recent book that he wrote and illustrated was “Bumble-Ardy,” a naughty pig party which came out in 2011, based on an old animated skit he worked up for “Sesame Street.”

In recent months, he had said he was working on a project about noses and he endorsed — against his best judgment — Stephen Colbert’s “I am a Pole (And So Can You!)”, a children’s story calculated to offend the master. Colbert’s book was published Tuesday.

“His art gave us a fantastical but unromanticized reminder of what childhood truly felt like,” Colbert said in a statement. “We are all honored to have been briefly invited into his world.”

Somebody up there has a sense of humor: As of Tuesday evening, “I Am a Pole” was No. 14 on Amazon.com’s best-seller list, outranking “Where the Wild Things Are” at No. 19.

Sendak also created costumes for ballets and staged operas. He designed sets for several productions at New York City Opera and he wrote for the opera adaptation of “Where the Wild Things Are.”

“He drew children in a realistic way, as opposed to an idealized way,” children’s books historian Leonard S. Marcus said. “His children weren’t perfect-looking. They didn’t resemble the people seen on advertising or in sitcoms. They looked more like immigrant children. It was a big change for American children’s books, which tended to take the melting pot approach and present children who were generic Americans.”

Revenge helped inspire “Where the Wild Things Are,” his  tale of the boy Max’s mind in flight in a forest of monsters, who just happen to look like some of Sendak’s relatives from childhood. “In The Night Kitchen,” released in 1971, was a forbidden dance of Laurel and Hardy in aprons and the flash of a boy’s privates, leading to calls for the book to be removed from library shelves.

His stories were less about the kids he knew — never had them, he was happy to say — than the kid he used to be. The son of Polish immigrants, he was born in 1928 in a Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn. The family didn’t have a lot of money and he didn’t have a lot of friends besides his brother and sister. He was an outsider at birth, as Christians nearby would remind him, throwing dirt and rocks as he left Hebrew school.

Sendak didn’t go to college and worked a variety of odd jobs until he was hired by the famous toy store FAO Schwarz as a window dresser in 1948. But illustration was his dream and his break came in 1951 when he was commissioned to do the art for “Wonderful Farm” by Marcel Ayme. By 1957 he was writing his own books and fame came shortly after that.

__

Reported by HILLEL ITALIE of the Associated Press from NEW YORK, N.Y. Associated Press writers Dave Collins in Hartford and Samantha Critchell in New York contributed to this report.

Read More

Superman fans the world over have spent countless hours wishing for x-ray vision, but a not-so-mad scientist says he’s close to making the superpower a reality.

X-ray goggles have been on sale at novelty shops and in the back pages of comic books for decades, but KTLA 5′s Dave Malkoff recently met Dr. Ken O — an engineer from the University of Texas — who says he’s building the real thing in a lab.

In the near future, Dr. O wants to enable cellphones with x-ray vision using something called Terrahertz waves.

“Of course, what this does is allows you to see through things,” Dr. O said.
Terrahertz waves are a kind of radiation, but they’re not exactly x-rays.

The waves operate on a lower frequency than x-rays, Dr. O said.

Their frequency is lower than tanning beds and lower than your remote control.

“Sending something out is like the flash bulb you have in the camera,” he said.

And flashing those waves at objects may allow cellphone users to see through and into them.
Dr. O said X-ray vision could be used to detect counterfeit cash for cracks in artwork or even scanning skin for signs of cancer.

But trying to use the technology to sneak a peek beneath someone’s clothes, Dr. O said doing so might put the user in danger.

“If you’re trying to do something like (that), you have to be within what I call the slapping distance,” he said.

When asked what inspired him to try and create real-life x-ray vision, Dr. O said it was children’s imaginations that gave him the idea.

– Reported by KTLA-TV from LOS ANGELES, Calif.

Read More

Kayla Schaum stepped into a stance, placing her feet shoulder-width apart and her toes against an imaginary straight line.

She raised a bow to her shoulders and pulled back the arrow in a perfect, horizontal line.

Closing one eye, she aimed for the bull’s-eye.

The 11-year-old from York is among a recent wave of young girls showing up at archery ranges and sporting goods stores across the country, searching for equipment and an experience to emulate Katniss Everdeen, the popular heroine in “The Hunger Games.”

Since the movie’s release this spring, local ranges are packed and equipment sales have soared by 20 percent, according to the Minnesota-based Archery Trade Association.

But Kayla said her target is strength, not idolatry.

“Katniss is brave … strong. Archery doesn’t make me feel like Katniss … it makes me feel strong,” she said.

Before reading the “Hunger Games” trilogy by

Suzanne Collins or seeing the movie, Kayla considered herself “a reader and artist.”

Once she found a flight path, she started to feel like an athlete.

“It takes a lot of muscle and patience and practice,” she said.

‘A certain finesse:’ The latter is one of the reasons girls sometimes outperform boys at the range, said Wayne Schuler, manager of Deer Valley Sporting Goods in West Manchester Township.

“Women shooters have a certain finesse and tend to have a more precise aim,” he said.

He’s noticed more women and girls showing up to fire arrows across his target hall.

He doesn’t solely credit “The Hunger Games” with the uptick, however. He’s noticed a surge in the sport during the last five years as women walked through the doors.

“Many of our customers are women with high-stress jobs. We have a lot of nurses who come in here to unwind,” he said.

There’s serenity in setting up a shot because “you have to focus so intently on what you’re doing that you forget your stress,” he said.

Xtreme Archery: Nate Reider wishes he had more time to feel that release. But as co-owner of Xtreme Archery in York he, too, has been busy with new customers, who are between 6 and 16 years old.

The new archery fans typically line up at Reider’s 3-D range on afternoons and weekends, taking aim among lifesize foam animals and real trees at the 24-target course.

To supply the increased demand, Reider hopes to host a “Hunger Games” Day — a fun Saturday tournament that would award trophy prizes, but spare the darkness of Katniss’ dystopian destiny.

Xtreme also hosts youth leagues, where partners compete for prizes during a 15-week challenge.

Local ranges are providing opportunities students may not receive in area schools.

“I don’t think we have one school in York County (enrolled in the National Archery in the Schools program),” said Samantha Pedder, outreach coordinator for the Pennsylvania Game Commission.

State number: But across Pennsylvania there is evidence of an increased interest in the sport.

The state sold 300,000 archery licenses during the 2011-12 hunting season and about 100 schools and 25,000 students enrolled in the National Archery in the Schools program, she said.

Pedder attributed the increased interest to “the ‘Hunger Games’ phenomenon” and “media attention,” which she said will benefit the entire archery community and continue growing the sport.

“Across the state, more and more people are choosing to pick up a bow and test out their skills,” she said.

EVEN MORE ARCHERY

If Panem, the fictitious country from “The Hunger Games,” is credited with spawning archery sales, Hollywood and London may be responsible for continuing them.

Archery will be featured in two movies and a TV show later this year.

This week, “The Avengers” opens and showcases several superheroes, including the arrow-toting Hawkeye. “Brave” opens June 22 and introduces the latest Disney princess, Merida, a skilled archer.

And the CW television network has plans for a “Smallville” spinoff about Green Arrow, who is DC Comics’ resident Robin Hood.

“Characters like Katniss Everdeen (from ‘Hunger Games’) and Merida are great heroines that champion the sport of archery. Katniss is a character that many people can relate to, and I think that her use of the bow and arrow as tools in the book will encourage many more girls to try their hand at archery,” said Samantha Pedder, outreach coordinator for the Pennsylvania Game Commission.

The sport is expected to receive even more attention in July when the 2012 Olympic Games open in London, where the U.S. has top-ranked competitors in seven of 10 categories in archery.

ARCHERY VIDEOS

• Get some basic tips on archery: http://ydtalk.com/jdispatch/2012/04/30/archery-basics/
• See some trick shooting: http://ydtalk.com/jdispatch/2012/04/30/amazing-archery/
• Watch an archery competition: http://ydtalk.com/jdispatch/2012/04/30/archery-competition/

Reported by CANDY WOODALL of The York Dispatch from YORK, Pa. Reach her at 505-5437 or cwoodall@yorkdispatch.com.

Read More

There’s a price to fame.

For ninth-grader Lance Chantiles-Wertz, fame cost him his head.

Or at least the blond curls on top of it.

The Spring Garden Township native landed a role as the younger version of Larry in “Three Stooges,” which opened April 13,

Although Lance is no stranger to the entertainment business — he’s been on everything from Broadway to Nickelodeon — it was his first feature film role.
And to play the childhood version of the iconic knucklehead, Lance had to get the horseshoe-shaped bald spot on his head.

Lance had no problem with it.

“If you asked my mother, she probably would have a different answer,” Lance said.
He’s right.

“I pretty much did freak out,” Sharon Chantiles said with a laugh about her son’s hair situation.

Temporary comedic baldness seemed like a small price, though, when it comes to getting time on the big screen.

“It was great. It was a lot of fun,” Lance said of filming the comedy in Atlanta.
He got to spend face-to-face and screen time with celebrities such as Jennifer Hudson, Larry David and Sean Hayes of “Will and Grace” fame.

Hayes played the adult Larry, although he got away with wearing a bald wig, Sharon said. Lance’s screen time is when Larry, Curly and Moe are shown as children.

Lance even shared a ride to the set with Emmy winner Jane Lynch.

“They were really great people,” Lance said of his co-stars.

Childhood full of acting: The role follows up voice-over and on-camera work on “Pan Am,” “A Gifted Man,” “Dora the Explorer” and “Go Diego Go,” among other shows. Lance has also performed with the New York City Ballet and the Metropolitan Opera in New York City, where he makes his second home.

It’s been a lifetime of work in acting, although Lance said he’s interested in math and science long-term.

For now, he said he’s just soaking it all in, like how he got to do a red carpet premiere for “Stooges” in Hollywood and then got to go to Frank Theatres back in York with his friends and family.

“I’d gone to the movies when I was a kid, and now seeing myself up there, it’s a different experience,” he said.

Lance was able to get in “Stooges” partly because of some good timing. He was in the green room for “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” as a guest of his movie star friend Abigail Breslin of “Little Miss Sunshine” fame. The pair had been performing together in Broadway’s “The Miracle Worker.”

Breslin’s agent stopped by the green room. She had seen Lance perform in “The Miracle Worker,” Sharon said, and thought he’d be perfect for playing the young Stooge.

“It’s serendipity,” Sharon said.

Reported by Andrew Shaw of the York Dispatch from YORK, Pa.

Here’s one of Junior Dispatch’s favorite classic “Three Stooges” clip: http://youtu.be/pP3VAtGLQms

Read More

Like small children, the cows had to check out everything.

As they were herded to the new milking parlor at Perrydell Farm to be milked Thursday, nearly every one stopped to smell a new wooden post and metal fences. One discovered a water trough and lapped up water.

“They are very curious,” said Donna Perry, whose husband, Tom, is one of three Perry brothers who own the farm.

The afternoon milking session was the first at the York Township farm since a fire destroyed the milking parlor in November.

Thursday was also the day the cows came home.

“It’s great to see them back,” said neighbor Sarah Tateosian, who, along with her husband, Lou, stopped by the farm to see the cows.

Fire: The fire, which was ruled accidental, started near a vacuum pump and severely damaged the milking parlor.

With no place to milk the cows, they were evacuated the night of the blaze by CART, which stands for the County Animal Response Team, and farmers from across the area, to a disused milking parlor at a Windsor Township farm. Donna Perry said she was amazed by and grateful for the support the farm received from the community.

The cows remained at the Windsor Township farm for just over five months.

New parlor: An all new milking parlor was completed at the end of March and in the early hours of Thursday morning, the Perrys and area farmers began the process of bringing the cows back home.

It took them a little under four hours to transport 111 cows back to Perrydell.

At first, the cows stood in the pasture for about half an hour checking it out, and then one kicked up its hind legs and took off running. The rest quickly followed, Donna Perry said.

“It was so fun to see them running and kicking up their heels,” she said. “It’s such a good feeling.”

The new parlor boasts a different layout and can milk more cows at once. Twelve cows were milked at one time at the old parlor, built 40 years ago, and the new one can milk 16 at a time. That should cut milking time by about an hour.

- Reported by GREG GROSS of the York Dispatch.

Read More