Eideard

Helen Staudinger, 92, wanted a kiss.

But authorities say after her 53-year-old neighbor refused, the central Florida woman aimed a semi-automatic pistol at his house and fired four times.

“If my head would have been over just a little bit further, (a bullet) probably would have hit me in the back of the head,” the neighbor, Dwight Bettner, told Reuters.

Staudinger remained in jail on Tuesday, a day after being arrested on charges of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and shooting into a dwelling…

Bettner, a former law enforcement officer and boilermaker, said his elderly neighbor has seemed attracted to him since he moved in six months ago. He’s not sure why.

“I’ve taken her trash out for her, just neighborly stuff,” Bettner said. “I guess she just took that as something else…”

Just after noon on Monday, Bettner argued with Staudinger when she came to his house and refused to leave, according to an incident report.

“I want a kiss before I leave,” Bettner said Staudinger told him.

No, he said. “Just go back to your property, and leave me alone,” Bettner recalled saying.

Bettner was on the phone with his father when he heard gunshots moments later. One bullet went through a window, spraying him with glass…

Bettner said on Tuesday that he would probably move out of his rented home. “I just don’t need the stress or the hassle,” he said. “I thought this only happened to younger people.”

Har.

A Polish man living in Germany spent five years with a bullet in the back of his head having forgotten he was shot because he was drunk when it happened.

Police in the western city of Bochum said doctors had found a .22-calibre round after the 35-year-old asked them to remove what he thought was a cyst.

They said the man recalled receiving a blow to the head around midnight at a New Year’s Eve party “in 2004 or 2005″…

“It may have been a shot fired up in the air which entered his head on the way down,” a police spokesman told reporters on Tuesday.

“He told us he remembered having a sore head, but that he wasn’t really one for going to the doctor.”

Should qualify as the dumbest something-or-other; but, I’m not sure what?

The world’s largest human migration — the annual crush of Chinese traveling home to celebrate the Lunar New Year, which is this Sunday — is going a little faster this time thanks to a new high-speed rail line.

The Chinese bullet train, which has the world’s fastest average speed, connects Guangzhou, the southern coastal manufacturing center, to Wuhan, deep in the interior. In a little more than three hours, it travels 664 miles, comparable to the distance from Boston to southern Virginia. That is less time than Amtrak’s fastest train, the Acela, takes to go from Boston just to New York.

Even more impressive, the Guangzhou-to-Wuhan train is just one of 42 high-speed lines recently opened or set to open by 2012 in China. By comparison, the United States hopes to build its first high-speed rail line by 2014, an 84-mile route linking Tampa and Orlando, Fla.

Speaking at that site last month, President Obama warned that the United States was falling behind Asia and Europe in high-speed rail construction and other clean energy industries. “Other countries aren’t waiting,” he said. “They want those jobs. China wants those jobs. Germany wants those jobs. They are going after them hard, making the investments required.”

Indeed, the web of superfast trains promises to make China even more economically competitive, connecting this vast country — roughly the same size as the United States — as never before, much as the building of the Interstate highway system increased productivity and reduced costs in America a half-century ago…

On a recent Wednesday, the 2:50 p.m. bullet train glided smoothly out of Guangzhou’s station and within four minutes was traveling more than 200 miles an hour. Practically every seat on the 14-car train was full of migrants heading home for Chinese New Year…

China’s response to the Great Recession was to invest federal funds in infrastructure capable of moving people as well as commodities. The Bullet Train project was targeted at 2020 in the original plan. When the recession hit, the emergency decision was made to accelerate construction.

Hundreds of thousands of workers got instant jobs. Manufacturers of components – global and domestic – benefitted from the new pace of production. And we’re told by conservative beancounters we should worry more about deficits than jobs or results.

President Obama mentioned an $8 billion investment in high-speed train systems across the country in his State of the Union speech on Wednesday.

Details released Thursday said the investment would be grants from the government’s $862 billion economic stimulus package to begin the planning and initial work on creating the first nationwide program of high-speed intercity passenger rail service.

Overall, projects and planning involving the rail corridors will take place in 31 states, according to a White House statement.

RTFA for key cities on the network

Obama and Vice President Joe Biden were scheduled to travel to Tampa, Florida…to formally announce the program. Other Cabinet members and administration officials also were visiting sites of the program in other states…

The statement described the program as “a long-term venture in which states will need to plan projects, purchase and lay track, build and assemble equipment, and construct or upgrade train stations, tunnels and bridges.”

Here in New Mexico we just finished construction, opening up rail service from south of Albuquerque to Santa Fe, the state capitol. The road bed looks good enough to me to serve high-speed trains; but, realistically, we haven’t the population and traffic [yet] to justify such a service.