- Bhutan, what took you so long? At long last, the isolated kingdom that almost no one outside of Bhutan can actually locate on a map has opened its doors to a team of art experts in order to preserve its Buddhist history. In opening those doors, the kingdom has agreed to work with conservators from The Courtauld Institute of Art in England, who have spent the last three years documenting some of the reclusive kingdom's most precious wall paintings. Working hand-in-hand with Bhutan's Department of Culture for the first time, a team led by Lisa Shekede has been examining wall paintings date from around the 17th century that are some of the best -surviving works in the region. Thus far, Shekede’s team has visited over 200 temples -- sometimes trekking for an entire day to reach remote monasteries -- and documented around 50 paintings in detail. It’s the sort of epic adventure work that aspiring archaeologists dream of when they watch Indiana Jones do his thing on the big screen. Shekede said she and colleague Stephen Rickerby admitted they were surprised to discover paintings of remarkable "sophistication" -- with walls decorated with gold leaf, precious pigments and organic glazes. The result of those components is what she termed "absolutely stunning" works of art. "They have a rich glow to them. There is so much gold and so much detail to them -- the paintings are extraordinarily fine with deep reds and yellows and gold. In the dim lights of the temples they really do glow like jewels," Shekede stated. The one pressing issue is that many of the paintings are in urgent need of conservation -- some damaged by fire and flooding, others from modern repainting and cleaning. The Courtauld Institute of Art confirmed that the research is fundamental for the painting's future preservation, with similar artifacts in India and Tibet having been irreversibly damaged by modern cleaning methods. "Unless you really understand how subtle these paintings are and how they're composed it's very easy to harm them when you clean them," said Shekede. "In fact one of the major problems has been Westerners coming into the region and doing inappropriate treatment of the works, which causes irreversible damage." All because Bhutan decided that it was time to welcome back the outside world………
- Some might call the Seattle Seahawks’ stunning 41-36 win over New Orleans Saturday afternoon in the first round of the NFL playoffs and earth-shaking victory for the first sub-.500 team ever to make the league’s postseason tournament. The win may not have changed the fact that the Seahawks and their putrid 7-9 record should never have been in the playoffs to begin with, but it may have made a far bigger impact. A key play in the game came with 3:22 left in the fourth quarter, with the Seahawks clinging to a 34-30 lead and needing a big play or long drive to put the defending Super Bowl champions away. They got that play when running back Marshawn Lynch busted through eight tackles on his way to the longest touchdown run - 67 yards - of his career that gave Seattle a 41-30 lead and for all intents and purposes, ended the game. The home crowd went predictably berserk when the play happened and even though John Vidale didn't get to see the game live, when he jumped online to watch highlights later that night, the director of the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network was intrigued by what he saw in a homemade video shot from the upper deck of Qwest Field following Marshawn Lynch's 67-yard touchdown run. "It was pretty striking how everyone was shaking," Vidale said. He then contacted a seismic monitoring station located about 100 yards west of the stadium and found that the station actually registered seismic activity during Lynch's run. The shaking was most intense during a 30-second stretch about the time Lynch broke through from the line of scrimmage, dove into the end zone and celebrated in the end zone with his teammates. After the celebration, Vidale said, the shaking died down, but it took about a minute for the shaking to completely fade away. He admitted that while this was the first time he has taken a look at the monitoring station near the stadium, it is typically concerned with monitoring the two-level viaduct highway that runs along the Seattle waterfront and the seawall. So next time your favorite team makes an amazing play and you could swear that the earth is literally shaking beneath your feet, you just might be correct………
- Aaaaaaaand that’s why you’re working at a convenience store or mini-mart attached to a gas station. Because when millions of dollars in lottery winnings are on the line, you make a mistake that costs the lottery three-quarters of a million dollars. That was the story in Georgetown, Ky., where a Kentucky woman quadrupled her prize winnings after a clerk accidentally added an escalator feature to her lottery ticket purchase, said officials with the Kentucky Lottery. Pamela Ivy purchases her Mega Millions ticket for the $380 million Jan. 4 drawing just like millions of other Americans, but the difference in her case was that the clerk told her the ticket cost $10 instead of the typical $5. The Megaplier feature had been accidentally added and even though she hadn’t asked for the prize multiplier feature, Ivy took the $10 ticket anyway. By accepting the ticket, Ivy put herself in place to win the game’s second prize of $1 million because the $250,000 was multiplied by the Megaplier number of four. She admitted that she put her ticket aside and didn’t check it until Thursday morning, two days after the drawing. “I dropped to my knees and praised God,” she said. Of course, winning $1 million in the lottery does not an actual millionaire make. By the time the Scott County resident walked out of lottery headquarters, she had a check for $690,000 after taxes in her hands. Where exactly did Ivy buy her ticket from the incompetent clerk? At Apple Market No. 5010 in Georgetown, of course. Ironically, the store will receive $10,000 for selling the winning ticket………
- It’s time to get the band back together. By band, of course, I mean a group of actors whose biggest accomplishment to date has been playing a bunch of freakishly outfitted wizards, hobbits and Middle Earth residents in adaptations of J.R.R. Tolkien’s literary works. But band or not, the actors who helped make the LOTR films so successful are in the process of reuniting to star in another film version of one of Tolkien’s most famous works. Sir Ian McKellen, one of the first to be attached to the project, has officially inked his deal to appear in The Hobbit. He will be joined by Andy Serkis will also be returning for motion-capture duty to reprise the role of Gollum, né Sméagol, the decrepit and disgusting-looking creature who loses the One Ring to Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit (thereby setting up his pursuit of Frodo in The Lord of the Rings trilogy). It has been widely assumed that McKellen and Serkis would return, but assumptions and verbal agreements tend to be worth the paper they are written on. The two actors join a cast that will also welcome back Elijah Wood and Cate Blanchett, although their duties are unclear at this time. Neither of their LOTR characters is in Tolkien's Hobbit novel, so working them into the mix could be somewhat challenging. Orlando Bloom also has an offer to join the cast, but as of yet he has not officially responded. If he does, Peter Jackson will have all of the key cogs from his successful LOTR runs in place for a movie that will undoubtedly make truckloads more money and have pale, pasty, basement-dwelling, never-kissed-a-girl dorks camping outside of their local theater to make sure they have a prime seat for the first showing at midnight of whatever God-forsaken day this movie opens. Filming begins Feb. 14 in New Zealand, so answers are closer than they might appear………
- Way to go, NASA. The federal government is slashing your budget, preventing you from going to space any more and yet you continue to come up with impressive discoveries that make us all stop and say, “Hey, that’s kind of cool. Now where’s my BlackBerry? I need to text my girlfriend.” NASA’s most recent big find came Monday when a NASA spacecraft detected a rocky planet that is the smallest ever discovered outside the Sun's solar system. The planet, called an exoplanet because it orbits a star other than the Sun, has been named Kepler-10b. Kepler-10b measures 1.4 times the Earth's diameter and was confirmed after more than eight months of data collection, the agency said. It is the first rocky, Earth-like, planet discovered by Kepler and has NASA researchers all fired up. "All of Kepler's best capabilities have converged to yield the first solid evidence of a rocky planet orbiting a star other than our sun," said Natalie Batalha, deputy science team leader for the NASA mission. "The Kepler team made a commitment in 2010 about finding the telltale signatures of small planets in the data, and it's beginning to pay off." Because of its size and rocky composition, Kepler-10b is believed to be more likely than gaseous planets to contain liquid water, and perhaps life of some kind, if it were the right distance from its star. The problem, according to NASA, is that Kepler-10b is much too close to its star -- 20 times closer than Mercury is to the Sun. That stat is about 560 light years from Earth, according to NASA. That isn’t dampening NASA’S enthusiasm, as its scientists remain optimistic about what other secrets of the universe Kepler might be able to reveal. "Although this planet is not in the habitable zone, the exciting find showcases the kinds of discoveries made possible by the mission and the promise of many more to come," said Kepler program scientist Douglas Hudgins. In all fairness, it’s worth acknowledging that the mission is the agency's first capable of finding Earth-size planets near the habitable zone, or the distance from a star where a planet can maintain liquid water and potential life. The Kepler spacecraft measures size and other details by noting the tiny decrease in a star's brightness that occurs when a planet crosses in front of it. Not that any of you didn’t already know all of that info……….
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