Don't Panic! Lighten Up!S


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Software decodes Mona Lisa's enigmatic smile

IT'S official: Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa was 83 per cent happy, 9 per cent disgusted, 6 per cent fearful and 2 per cent angry.

Coffee

Thrift Store Manager Finds Heirloom Buffet

Omaha, Nebraska - It was a tiny, cigarette burn on an old buffet that first grabbed Laura Michael's attention at the Goodwill WearHouse. As the manager, she's used to seeing worn pieces of furniture. But two weeks ago, this newly delivered piece seemed to evoke memories and the smells of holidays at her family home in Phoenix.

She thought about how her family had a similar heirloom, given to them by her great-grandmother. But her mother was forced to sell it two decades ago because money was tight.

When she saw the burn, she was struck because her old buffet was scarred in the same way.

And then, the 37-year-old woman took a position familiar to her as a child. She crawled underneath the 5-foot-long, 3-foot high buffet. ...

Smiley

The Skeleton of Jebal-Barez

The name should have been a clue: Shill ing.

Today Signs Received this link from a reader. Scroll down and look at the photos of the "creature."

Thing is, it is a hoax.

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Montreal man trading paper-clip for house

A Montreal man is grabbing international attention for his increasingly successful quest to barter a single red paper-clip for a house.

Smiley

Flashback! Satire: CIA Asks Bush To Discontinue Blog

Washington, DC— - In the interest of national security, President Bush has been asked to stop posting entries on his three-month-old personal web log, acting CIA director John E. McLaughlin said Monday.

According to McLaughlin, several recent entries on PrezGeorgeW.typepad.com have compromised military operations, while other posts may have seriously undercut the PR efforts of White House press secretary Scott McClellan.

A July 24 posting read, "Just got back from a lunch with Colin and Adil Moussa (one of Prince Saud al-Faisal's guys). Colin wants the Saudis to send some troops to Najaf—so some of the soldiers are Arab, I guess. This Moussa guy sure wears a lot of jewelry. A golden chain, a golden ring with his initials or something, and some other sparkling stuff—kinda effeminate. Anyway, best of luck in Iraq, Iyad."

Magic Wand

Remote-controlled toilets

A US company has come up with the perfect gift for people who have everything - a £3,000 remote-controlled toilet.

Smiley

Prisoner escaped to buy MacDonald's

An escaped prisoner was caught trying to get back into a Tennessee jail with four MacDonald's hamburgers.

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Russian Neo-pagan Myths and Antisemitism

Russian Neo-paganism is one branch of contemporary Russian nationalism that emerged and developed in the 1970s–1990s. Its ideology is based on the glorification of the pre-Christian Russian past and accuses Christianity of the brutal destruction of the legacy of the Great Ancestors. At the same time, Christianity is treated as an evil ideology created by Jews in order to establish their own dominance of the world and the subjugation of all peoples. Russian Neo-paganism is in fact rooted in Nazi-style rhetoric full of latent or open antisemitism. This paper discusses the ideology and its political implications.

Comment: Comment: To understand the reality of "Russian Neo-Paganism," the reader is urged to get a copy of Laura Knight-Jadczyk's seminal work: The Secret History of the World.


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Life after Death - The "Denial of Death" Hypothesis

In his book, Becoming Human, Ian Tattersall says,

The Neanderthals had occasionally practiced burial of dead, but among the Cro-Magnons we see for the first time evidence of regular and elaborate burial, with hints of ritual and belief in an afterlife.

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Becoming Human: Evolution and Human Uniqueness

Science is not a disinterested examination of the structures of reality. Objective truths about the world can be captured only in the thicket of cultural belief, refined experience and honed intuition. The nature Darwin met on his Beagle voyage in the 1830's did not flow through hollow eyes to imprint features mechanically on a pliant brain; it came tumbling through a mind whose romantic contours had been prepared by extensive study of the work of the German adventurer Alexander von Humboldt. In ''The Origin of Species'' (1859), that nature -- creative, value-laden and goal-directed --had not shed its original cultural guise.