Awristwatch buried in the ice at the North Pole three years ago was found by a boy some 2,900 kilometres away after it floated ashore on the Faeroe Islands.
Niels Jakup Mortensen, 11, spotted a black box near his home on Suduroy, the Faeroes’ southernmost island, his mother Anna Jacobsen said. Inside, she said, was a watch that had been buried at the North Pole by Joergen Amundsen, a descendant of Norwegian polar explorer Roald Amundsen.
Jacobsen said the watch, discovered by her son earlier this month, was still working, and was accompanied by a letter from Joergen Amundsen. “It was so unbelievable,” she said. “It had been buried in the North Pole.”
Hjalmar Hatun, an oceanographer with the Faeroese Fisheries Laboratory, said the watch likely drifted south with one of the chunks of ice that frequently break away at the North Pole and are carried off by ocean currents.
The Faeroes, an 18-island Danish territory, are located halfway between Scotland and Iceland.
Hatun said the ice breaking off is not related to global warming, as the phenomenon was first observed more than 100 years ago. “So in that sense, the fact that objects from the North Pole can drift south is old news,” he said
The story about a contractor who discovered $182,000 in cash stashed behind a bathroom wall of an 83 year old home. Unfortunately, the money did not last too long.
While renovating homeowner and high school friend Amanda Reece’s house, Kitts found green metal boxes hidden behind a bathroom wall, labelled to return to ‘P. Dunne News Agency’. In the lockboxes were $182,000 in depression era currency, belonging to wealthy businessman Patrick Dunne.
Kitts told Reece about the cash, who rushed home and they counted a hefty $182,000. But out of greed on both parts, they were unable to negotiate a reasonable split. Kitts wanted 40%, but Reece did not want to give him more than 10%. So Reece took the matter to court, who decided in her favour.
A month after testifying in court, the Dunne family sued her for the money, splitting it between 21 descendants of Patrick Dunne.
Investors have commented that $182,000 worth of mint notes from the 1920s would probably be worth close to a million dollars.
Is fifth-grader Kenton Stufflebeam smarter than the Smithsonian?
Since the Smithsonian opened in 1981, millions of people have passed a display involving prehistoric time. Nobody ever reported anything amiss with the exhibit until 11-yr-old Kenton Stufflebeam noticed that a notation identified the Precambrian as an era.
Kenton, was the first person to ever spot that the famous museum had identified the Precambrian as an era. Kenton had noticed the error because his teacher had almost made the same mistake during an earth-science lesson. Of course everyone knows that the Precambrian is actually a dimensionless unit of time. Well, everyone except for the countless dimwits who visited the Smithsonian.
A 12-year-old boy who uses his iPhone mostly for texting with his girlfriend has discovered what looks like a new vulnerability with the device.
“Thus all I need to do to intercept the messages from his girlfriend is to place the phone in emergency mode and wait 30 seconds for the next sickly sweet message,”
The unnamed boy, son of blogger Karl Kraft, turns on the passcode lock and disables SMS Preview in order to prevent his parents from seeing any messages, Kraft wrote on his blog.
Those settings block the display of incoming text messages and show an alert saying ‘New Text Message’ if a text comes through while the phone is locked. However, if the phone is set to emergency call mode the incoming text messages are previewed.
It’s hardly a place you would expect to find a $1 million painting. But one March morning four years ago, Elizabeth Gibson was on her way to get coffee, as usual, when she spotted a large and colorful abstract canvas nestled between two big garbage bags in front of the Alexandria, an apartment building on the northwest corner of Broadway and 72nd Street in Manhattan.
“I had a real debate with myself,” said Ms. Gibson, a writer and self-professed Dumpster diver. “I almost left it there because it was so big, and I kept thinking to myself, ‘Why are you taking this back to your crammed apartment?’”
But, she said, she felt she simply had to have the 38-by-51-inch painting, because “it had a strange power.”
Experts say the painting is in miraculously good condition and worth about $1 million
Art experts would agree with her. As it turns out, the painting was “Three People,” a 1970 canvas by the celebrated 20th-century Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo that was stolen 20 years ago and is the subject of an F.B.I. investigation.
Ms. Gibson said she did not suspect that the painting had any commercial value when she found it. “I am not a modern-art aficionado,” she said. “It was so overpowering, yet it had a cheap frame.”
The painting had been missing for so long that the owners, a married couple whom Sotheby’s would not identify, had long since given up hope of ever seeing it again. The husband, a Houston collector and businessman, had purchased “Three People” at a Sotheby’s auction in 1977 as a birthday present for his wife. He paid $55,000 for it.
Ten years later, when the couple were in the midst of moving from a house to an apartment in Houston, they put the painting into storage at a local warehouse. It was there that it disappeared.
How “Three People” got from a Houston warehouse 20 years ago to the streets of New York remains a mystery.
A five-year hunt for a man accused of killing a police informant in Phoenix ended in Toronto’s west end this weekend thanks to a “courageous” young woman who turned in her boyfriend.
Mikhail Drachev, 24, who has been on the run since the “horrific” slaying of Konstantin Simberg in December 2001, was arrested by police Friday in the Rexdale apartment the pair had been sharing for more than five years.
“About a week ago, he decided to come clean and give her his real name because they were thinking about marriage,” Staff-Sgt. Paul MacIntyre said yesterday. “She Googled his name and learned he was in fact on America’s Most Wanted.”
The fugitive’s girlfriend, whose name was not released, was initially “conflicted,” MacIntyre said. Although it took her a week to tell police, she eventually “did the right thing” and should be commended, he said.
“She was with this fellow for a long time, and obviously they were very close,” MacIntyre said. “The fact that she came in to a (police) station and told us who he was, I think, showed tremendous courage on her behalf.”
Drachev and two other men are accused of attacking Simberg, 21, while he was on the phone with a cop. He was stabbed in the back, doused with gas and set ablaze.
He’s a criminal, but he “did the right thing” when it mattered - alerting cops to what he feared was a terror plot the day before the Fourth of July.
He was stunned when he looked inside - it was filled with gas cans and Styrofoam cups containing a mysterious white substance with protruding wires and switches.
The street is lined with brownstones, and there’s a ballet studio and a small Muslim school. So he drove the van 15 blocks to 37th Street and parked it at a desolate waterfront location behind the Costco store and next to some little-used piers.
Then he got out and called a cop he knows from his run-ins with the law.
“He did the right thing,” a high-ranking officer said. “And he possibly saved a lot of people’s lives.”
Another source said cops are unlikely to file charges for the break-in.
It’s the classic automotive fairy tale; buy a farmhouse that has been abandoned for 15 years only to find a shed full of vintage cars.
Imagine you’re Ali Baba, stumbling on the 40 Thieves’ treasure — only the thieves are long gone and the treasure is actually 180 European cars of various description.
That’s kind of what happened in this case, where inside a warehouse welded shut for years, a wealth of dusty cars — Jags, Porsches, Lancias, Alfas, Lotuses, Austin Minis, Renaults, open-wheel formula cars, and on and on — sat rusting for over 15 years.
No word yet on who’s claiming the cars, or what will become of them, but we’d imagine there are a few resto shops in Lisbon whose phones are ringing off the hook.
Huge collections like the one in Portugal don’t just happen. Cars are accumulated by someone with a purpose
The owner of the cars was a car dealer in the 1970s and 1980s, and decided to save the more interesting cars that came through his doors. When the barn was full, he padlocked and “soldered” the doors shut. (Perhaps welding was too permanent.)
Web sites varied on the number of cars: 58, 100, and 180 were speculated. Unfortunately none of the cars is for sale.
nice post