Violinist: Fall fractures $1M fiddle

LONDON - Can his fractured fiddle — a million dollar Guadagnini — be fixed? It's too early to tell.



David Garrett, a former model who has been called the David Beckham of the classical scene, said he tripped while carrying his 18th century violin as he was leaving London's Barbican Hall after a performance, smashing it to bits.

"I had it over my shoulder in its case and I fell down a concrete flight of stairs backward," Garrett said Thursday. "When I opened the case, much of my G.B. Guadagnini had been crushed."

Garrett said he bought the 1772 violin for $1 million in 2003, and he is now hoping to get it repaired in New York, where he is based.

"I hope and pray that it can be fixed, but if it can't, I hope my insurance policy will let me buy another great violin," the 26-year-old musician said. He told The Associated Press that other published accounts saying the violin was a Stradivarius were incorrect. Guadagnini is believed by some to have been a student of Antonio Stradivari.

The accident occurred Dec. 27 but only came to light this week when he returned to London for another concert at the Barbican and told British reporters what had happened.

For his Valentine's Day concert there, he is playing a Stradivarius that's been loaned to him.

Garrett gained attention as a child prodigy. Before he was 10, he played as a soloist with the London Philharmonic, according to his Web site. When he studied at the Juilliard School in New York, he became a parttime model to help supplement his income.

At least she will always win the arguments.

Woman weds corpse...

AHMEDABAD, India (Reuters) - An Indian woman, despairing over her lover's accidental death when he fell down a well soon after their engagement, insisted on ceremonially marrying his corpse just minutes before the cremation.

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"It was for just few minutes the girl was dressed as a bride and then as a widow," K.M. Kapadia, a police officer in the town of Anand in western Gujarat state, said on Saturday.

Wedding attendees sat the corpse up by a fire, the traditional center of Hindu wedding ceremonies, and chanted some marriage prayers before cremating the body, police said.

"The girl refused to give away the body of her lover for the cremation till she tied the knot with him," Kapadia said.

The bride's parents opposed the marriage but later attended the wedding ceremony and gave their 22-year-old daughter Tulsi Devipujak clothes and utensils as gifts, according to the Hindu tradition.

No duh.

You Can't Travel Back in Time, Scientists Say

The urge to hug a departed loved one again or prevent atrocities are among the compelling reasons that keep the notion of time travel alive in the minds of many.

While the idea makes for great fiction, some scientists now say traveling to the past is impossible.

There are a handful of scenarios that theorists have suggested for how one might travel to the past, said Brian Greene, author of the bestseller, “The Elegant Universe” and a physicist at Columbia University.“And almost all of them, if you look at them closely, brush up right at the edge of physics as we understand it. Most of us think that almost all of them can be ruled out.”

Vote for Your Favorite Time Travel Tale
The fourth dimension

In physics, time is described as a dimension much like length, width, and height. When you travel from your house to the grocery store, you’re traveling through a direction in space, making headway in all the spatial dimensions—length, width and height. But you’re also traveling forward in time, the fourth dimension.

“Space and time are tangled together in a sort of a four-dimensional fabric called space-time,” said Charles Liu, an astrophysicist with the City University of New York, College of Staten Island and co-author of the book “One Universe: At Home In The Cosmos.”

Space-time, Liu explains, can be thought of as a piece of spandex with four dimensions. “When something that has mass—you and I, an object, a planet, or any star—sits in that piece of four-dimensional spandex, it causes it to create a dimple,” he said. “That dimple is a manifestation of space-time bending to accommodate this mass.”

The bending of space-time causes objects to move on a curved path and that curvature of space is what we know as gravity.

Mathematically one can go backwards or forwards in the three spatial dimensions. But time doesn’t share this multi-directional freedom.

“In this four-dimensional space-time, you’re only able to move forward in time,” Liu told LiveScience.

Video: Can You Time Travel?
Tunneling to the past

A handful of proposals exist for time travel. The most developed of these approaches involves a wormhole—a hypothetical tunnel connecting two regions of space-time. The regions bridged could be two completely different universes or two parts of one universe. Matter can travel through either mouth of the wormhole to reach a destination on the other side.

“Wormholes are the future, wormholes are the past,” said Michio Kaku, author of “Hyperspace” and “Parallel Worlds” and a physicist at the City University of New York. “But we have to be very careful. The gasoline necessary to energize a time machine is far beyond anything that we can assemble with today’s technology.”

To punch a hole into the fabric of space-time, Kaku explained, would require the energy of a star or negative energy, an exotic entity with an energy of less than nothing.

Greene, an expert on string theory—which views matter in a minimum of 10 dimensions and tries to bridge the gap between particle physics and nature's fundamental forces, questioned this scenario.

“Many people who study the subject doubt that that approach has any chance of working,” Greene said in an interview . “But the basic idea if you’re very, very optimistic is that if you fiddle with the wormhole openings, you can make it not only a shortcut from a point in space to another point in space, but a shortcut from one moment in time to another moment in time.”

Video: How to Time Travel!
Cosmic strings

Another popular theory for potential time travelers involves something called cosmic strings—narrow tubes of energy stretched across the entire length of the ever-expanding universe. These skinny regions, leftover from the early cosmos, are predicted to contain huge amounts of mass and therefore could warp the space-time around them.

Cosmic strings are either infinite or they’re in loops, with no ends, said J. Richard Gott, author of “Time Travel in Einstein's Universe” and an astrophysicist at Princeton University. “So they are either like spaghetti or SpaghettiO’s.”

The approach of two such strings parallel to each other, said Gott, will bend space-time so vigorously and in such a particular configuration that might make time travel possible, in theory.

“This is a project that a super civilization might attempt,” Gott told LiveScience. “It’s far beyond what we can do. We’re a civilization that’s not even controlling the energy resources of our planet.”

Impossible, for now

Mathematically, you can certainly say something is traveling to the past, Liu said. “But it is not possible for you and me to travel backward in time,” he said.

However, some scientists believe that traveling to the past is, in fact, theoretically possible, though impractical.

Maybe if there were a theory of everything, one could solve all of Einstein’s equations through a wormhole, and see whether time travel is really possible, Kaku said. “But that would require a technology far more advanced than anything we can muster," he said. "Don’t expect any young inventor to announce tomorrow in a press release that he or she has invented a time machine in their basement.”

For now, the only definitive part of travel in the fourth dimension is that we’re stepping further into the future with each passing moment. So for those hoping to see Earth a million years from now, scientists have good news.

“If you want to know what the Earth is like one million years from now, I’ll tell you how to do that,” said Greene, a consultant for “Déjà Vu,” a recent movie that dealt with time travel. “Build a spaceship. Go near the speed of light for a length of time—that I could calculate. Come back to Earth, and when you step out of your ship you will have aged perhaps one year while the Earth would have aged one million years. You would have traveled to Earth’s future.”

More about Time Travel

Vote for Your Favorite Time Travel Tale Video: Is Time Travel Possible? Video: How to Time Travel!
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So Happy together.

You know the honeymoon is over ...
... when the groom stands accused of trying to run over his new wife
The Associated Press
Updated: 10:23 p.m. PT March 6, 2007
SALT LAKE CITY - It wasn’t the most romantic of honeymoons.

Police said a groom is in jail, accused of trying to run over his new wife after a weekend wedding in Las Vegas.

“We have a wedding certificate for (March) 4th. They were still honeymooning when he ran her over,” said Lt. Paul Jaroscak, a spokesman for the Salt Lake County sheriff’s office.

Police received an emergency call Monday from someone reporting a couple fighting in a car as they traveled on Highland Drive, about 10 miles southeast of Salt Lake City. Katie Martindale, 29, apparently got out of the car and started to walk away when James Olwine, 33, drove off the road and hit her with the car, pushing her into a snowbank, Jaroscak said.

Martindale was not seriously injured but might have a broken leg, Jaroscak said.

Olwine was booked into the county jail for investigation of charges of aggravated assault with a vehicle, the lieutenant said. He has not had a court appearance. Authorities said they did not know whether he had an attorney.

Both have jail records and are “well known to the sheriff’s office,” he said.

© 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Hmmm, really, for me?

CASCADE TOWNSHIP, Mich. -- Two packages containing human body parts -- including a liver and a partial head -- that were intended for a Traverse City lab instead were delivered to a home.
The body parts, sent from China, were mistakenly dropped off Thursday at Franc and Ludivine Larmande's Kent County home by a DHL express driver who believed the bubble-wrapped items were pieces to a table.
"My husband started to unwrap one and said, 'This is strange, it looks like a liver,"' Ludivine Larmande told The Grand Rapids Press. "He started the second one, but stopped as soon as we saw the ear.
"Something wasn't right. It was scary, and I'm glad I didn't open them."
The couple called Kent County sheriff's deputies, and detectives determined the body parts -- which are preserved -- were for medical research, Lt. Roger Parent said.
Authorities believe 28 more bubble-wrapped human organs and body parts could be dispersed across the country, the newspaper said. Two of five packages headed to the northern Michigan lab broke open, scattering their contents.
"There will definitely be a shock to people if they see these things, but there is no hazard to health," Parent said.
The sheriff's department said Saturday that it didn't have any additional information about the case.
The delivery company cooperated with investigators, DHL spokesman Robert Mints said. It also is conducting an investigation to determine whether it should have shipped the body parts and how the packages were dispersed.
"We certainly handle medical specimens, and we're trying to determine if the items shipped were permissible," Mints said. "It's not immediately clear what happened."

Kid gets jacked up.

I saw this on AFV one Sunday night not too far back.



Thank you Sarah for the submission.

I hope it wasn't stuck on The Weather Channel.

HAMPTON BAYS, N.Y., Feb. 17 (AP) — A man’s body was found in his home with the television still on and his features preserved by the dry air in his home, officials said. He is thought to have been dead for more than a year.

The man, Vincenzo Ricardo, 70, apparently died of natural causes, said Dr. Stuart Dawson, Suffolk County’s deputy chief medical examiner.

The Southampton town police found Mr. Ricardo’s body this week after a report of burst pipes.

The home’s dry air had left his features intact, said a morgue assistant, Jeff Bacchus.

Mr. Ricardo’s wife died years ago, and he lived alone, Mr. Dawson said.

“He hasn’t been heard from in over a year,” he said. “That’s the part that baffles me.”

Neighbors said they had thought Mr. Ricardo was in a hospital or nursing home. Still, a neighbor, Diane Devon, said residents at a gathering last month remarked that they had not seen him in some time.

“We never thought to check on him,” she said.