Maidmer not the mermaid

The sailors(ancient)/great story tellers ,who visited the foreign lands ...mixed imagination and facts and disbursed saline cocktails to the ignorant.Mermaids are among them, deprived of their biological needs they fancied about mermaids and passed on the stories to others.Some talented craftsmen even done posthumous plastic surgery to the monkey bodies stitching fish tails and dried it to present it later to unsuspecting influentials in foreign lands for favours.Some wrote and some applied their imagination.

A HAPPY NEW YEAR.

Beleive it or not..

Beleive it or not..Jinnah married a girl aged 16 from Darjeeling when he was 40,that is after the death of his first wife.Jaswant singh is a representative (Lok Sabha MP) from Darjeeling constituency.Now he wrote a book on Jinnah which created a controversy leading to his outstre from the BJP party.

Abducted at 11, now mother of 2; girl found after 18 yrs

A girl snatched on her way to school was hidden for nearly two decades behind a series of fences, sheds and tents, even giving birth to her suspected abductor's children in the suburban backyard compound less than 200 miles from her childhood home. Jaycee Lee Dugard, who was 11 when she was abducted from a South Lake Tahoe street in 1991, was taken directly to the house and sheltered from the world in a secret, leafy backyard, investigators said Thursday. Her abductor, investigators said, raped her and fathered two children with her, the first when Jaycee was about 14. Those girls, now 11 and 15, also were kept hidden away in the backyard compound behind the Antioch home. "None of the children have ever been to school, they've never been to a doctor," El Dorado County Undersheriff Fred Kollar said. "They were kept in complete isolation in this compound." Even a parole agent who visited 58-year-old Phillip Garrido's home didn't have an inkling about the hidden compound, Kollar said. Garrido is a registered sex offender on federal parole for rape and kidnapping convictions. "The way the house is set up, the way the backyard is set up, you could walk through the backyard, walk through the house, and never know," Kollar said. "He's had her for 18 years. Now, it's our turn. I have no compassion for this guy," he said Friday morning on ABC's "Good Morning America." But neighbours said there were clues even before a parole agent on Wednesday noticed Dugard, now 29, who accompanied Garrido, his wife and the children to a parole office. Neighbour Diane Doty said she could see the tents and often heard children playing in the backyard, the corner of which abuts her own backyard. She said she even suspected the children lived in the tents, but her husband said she should leave the family alone. "I asked my husband, 'Why is he living in tents?'" she said. "And he said, 'Maybe that is how they like to live.'" Dugard's stepfather, who witnessed her abduction and was a longtime suspect in the case, said he was overwhelmed by the news after doing everything he could to help find her. "It broke my marriage up. I've gone through hell, I mean I'm a suspect up until yesterday," a tearful Carl Probyn, 60, said at his home in Orange, Calif. Carl Probyn told CBS' "Early Show" Friday morning that he spoke to his wife late Thursday after she reunited with Dugard and everyone was "doing great." "I think they're pretty happy," he said, noting six people were together at the reunion -- Jaycee Dugard, her two daughters, her sister, mother and another relative. source:http://www.ndtv.com

Doctors baffled by Indian village of 200 sets of twins

• Kodinji village, in Malappuram district of Kerala, has an unusually high number of twins-at least 220 pairs in a population of 14,600
  
• The national average is 8.1 twins per 1,000 live births. Kodinji's rate is five times that-45 per 1,000 births
  
• The number of twins born here each year is increasing-there are only nine pairs of twins aged 41-60 years, against 81 pairs aged 5-15 years
  
• The cause is perhaps not genetic, as the high rate of twins is found among Kodinji's Hindus, Muslims, as well as among outsiders who have settled here. Perhaps the cause is an environmental factor, but this is yet to be investigated.
  
• The phenomenon continues to pose a mystery to geneticists, doctors, other experts

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HAIRY PROBER !!!

A famous 1935 book called Rats, Lice and History, by bacteriologist Hans Zinsser, expounds on the “intimate role” that lice played in the social life of the human race until well into the 19th century. “It was not so long ago, indeed, that its prevalence extended to the highest orders of society, and was accepted as an inevitable part of existence like baptism, or the smallpox,” he writes.

Some cultures even incorporated the parasite into their traditions, according to Zinsser. The Aztec people collected lice from their bodies in small bags and laid them at the feet of their king. Native people of Northern Siberia threw lice on a visitor in a traditional declaration of love. Zinsser explains this as “a sort of ‘My louse is thy louse’ ceremony.” A Swedish town in the Middle Ages elected a mayor by placing a louse in the middle of a table of eligible candidates, and “The one into whose beard the louse first adventured was the mayor for the ensuing year.”

Later, some Europeans took to shaving their heads and wearing a wig in an effort to deter lice, but the wigs themselves were often full of nits. Nitpicking was a way of life; educated children, however, were taught that it was “improper to take lice or fleas or other vermin by the neck to kill them in company, except in the most intimate circles,” according to Zinsser.

Cats

HUMOSPIENS-EXCLUSIVE
At Alipore Zoo Kolkata..