Funny Bone

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Before being saved on Sunday morning (July 12), a missing baby boy was "navigating" his battery-powered toy truck in a wild ride down B.C.'s Peace River for 12 kilometers over 2 hours on his 3rd birthday. When spotted, the toddler was kneeling on all fours on top of the overturned car, sitting in about three meters of water, according to Fort St. John RCMP. "He was wet from his knees down, and his hands were wet, but this torso was okay". Rescued from the swirling 10ft deep water, the boy was insisting that he wanted to get back on his “boat”, and he “had made his truck into a boat and rode down the river.” The baby navigator was in good shape except for needing a diaper change.

The boy was not wearing a lifejacket, just a diaper and T-shirt at the time. He went missing from his family's campsite in the Peace Island Park just after 7 a.m. Sunday. Campers joined Fort St. John RCMP in a full-scale search of the park to find him. Don Loewen spotted the boy more than two hours after he went missing while searching the river with four other men in his boat.  read more »

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Photos from National Geographic Best Photo Awards - Nature.

Top left: Glass might have separated Morgan Hurley from Kimani, one of the lowland gorillas at the Franklin Park Zoo, but these two didn't seem to have any trouble sizing one another up. When Kimani wandered off to check out some other visitors, Morgan did her best to get the young gorilla's attention.

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Photos courtesy of authorstream.com, izismile.com, greenexpander.com, Bill Brett / Boston.com, and National Geographic

Original Source: Boston Globe

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A horse racing trainer loves to trot to the pub for a glass of Red Stripe lager - on his zebra. Dad-of-two Bill Turner bought 14-month-old Zebedee for £4,500 from a Dutch game reserve. Bill, 61, said: "He loves being ridden and it means I don't have to worry about being breathalysed."

Zebras are notoriously difficult to break in but the former jump jockey soon coaxed Zebedee to accept a bridle and saddle. In less than three weeks Bill was riding his new mount round his farm. Now Mr Turner rides Zebedee to his local, the King's Arms, for a pint after work.

Bill, who saddled 600 winners in 30 years as a trainer, said: "It's a mile and a half to the pub and Zebedee pricks up his ears every time we go. "The RSPCA says its OK to ride him." Bill's wife Tracy, 61, followed in a lorry on the first pub outing in case Zebedee tired and had to be driven back. But ten-stone Bill said: "He had no trouble and even cantered for a bit. The regulars got an incredible shock when I rode up."

It was the trainer's lifelong ambition to break and ride a zebra. Bill said: "I've broken hundreds of horses and wanted to try my luck with a zebra. "Very few are ridden in Africa - usually the only way to mount one is to put it in a river." Finally a livestock agent who Bill deals with in Belgium found the zebra for him. Bill said: "They say zebras are so hard to train because they don't have any brains and panic easily. Zebedee gave me a hard time at first, coming at me with his front feet and also biting.  read more »

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Last weekend saw the 150th anniversary of the birth of Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the world's most celebrated fictional detective. So what's kept him at the top for 122 years?

In 1887, appearing in print for the first time, Sherlock Holmes set out his purpose in life. The declaration in "A Study in Scarlet" would also come to dictate much of the subsequent career of Holmes' creator, Arthur Conan Doyle - not always to his pleasure. "There's the scarlet thread of murder running through the colorless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it." He went on to define the archetype of the brilliant but troubled detective. Even today the character of Holmes defines what we expect of great fictional detectives. We want them to accept that "duty" to do good - but also to be personally flawed.

The 28 year-old author wasn't the first to spot the narrative potential of an incisive but troubled detective. Conan Doyle himself acknowledged the influence of Edgar Allan Poe's Auguste Dupin and of Lecoq, created by the now largely forgotten Emile Gaboriau. But almost every fictional detective stands in Holmes' shadow - from Kurt Wallander back to Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe. Chandler once wrote: "Sherlock Holmes is mostly an attitude and a few dozen lines of unforgettable dialogue." This may or may not have been a compliment.  read more »

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The German Office Chair Racing Championship was held in Bad Koenig-Zell, Germany, on Saturday, April 25, 2009. Seventy participants took a chance and brought their office chair out into the sunshine and put it through its paces. The race down Odenwaelder street was mainly downhill and involved starting on a steep ramp and racing over another ramp.

The only uniform rule was a crash helmet, which many participants needed. Dozens of racers fell off their chairs, and many chairs didn't make it to the end of the 170-meter race.

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Photos courtesy of demonicious.com

Original Source: Cave News and Reuters (with video)