Eideard

A slippery character

Seventy-five bottles of body lotion stuffed down his pants did not help Chamil Guadarrama make a slick getaway.

Guadarrama, 30, of Framingham, was arrested Wednesday night on a charge of shoplifting more than $250 from Bath & Body Works in the Eastfield Mall, said Sgt. John M. Delaney, aide to Police Commissioner William J. Fitchet.

When he was apprehended by mall security officers Jane Colon and Jeff Lawlor and held for police after a brief foot chase, Guadarrama was found with 75 8-ounce glass bottles of lotion stuffed into his pants, Delaney said.

“They could not fit Mr. Guadarrama into the cruiser because his pants were bursting at the seams and he could not bend over,” Delaney said.

He said Guadarrama was wearing ordinary trousers but had string tied around each ankle to keep the bottles from slipping out…

A clerk at the store spotted Guadarrama slipping bottles of lotion through his zipper, and alerted security, Delaney said. Colon asked him to stop, but Guadarrama tried to run, he said.

Given the sheer volume of merchandise down his pants – the equivalent of nearly 5 gallons – the 5-foot, 10-inch, 210-pound Guadarrama did not exactly tear through the mall with a sprinter’s speed…

Guadarrama pleaded innocent at his district court arraignment Thursday. He was released on his own recognizance and ordered to return to court on March 19.

I’m getting tired of the automatic “Not Guilty” pleas. Can’t we institute a system where crooks like this ditz can plead guilty and get better TV in their cells or something – for not wasting taxpayer money and court time?

Hand gels supplied to a prison to combat the risk of swine flu have been removed after inmates realised it contained alcohol and began drinking it to try to get drunk.

At least one prisoner at HMP The Verne on Portland, Dorset, was found intoxicated. The Prison Service confirmed that this case was being investigated but meanwhile antibacterial gel pumps had been removed as a “precautionary measure”.

Andy Fear, a member of the Verne’s Prison Officers Association (POA) committee, said the canisters had been ordered because of the swine flu threat.

“It was subsequently reported by some association members working here that the inmates had been incorrectly using them, for want of a better phrase,” he said.

Alcoholics can be as self-destructive as junkies. Any time.

Traditional salt-making, hand harvesting
Daylife/AFP/Getty Images

In the early 1990s, João Navalho, a microbiologist fresh out of graduate school, came to the salt marshes in the Algarve region with a handful of young partners to grow and harvest microalgae. The business foundered…After years of frustrated effort, the partners suddenly changed course. “We looked around and said, ‘We’re stupid!”‘ Navalho recalled. “We have a lot of land here. What we should do with the salinas is produce salt!”…

Like everything else in this undertaking, the answer was staring them in the face. Living on the edge of the marshes was Maximino António Guerreiro, a sunburned retired salt worker with a grizzled beard and missing teeth, who started harvesting here with his father more than four decades ago.

In 1997, the salt project began. Guerreiro cleaned out and rebuilt the long-abandoned patchwork of rectangular, clay-lined salt beds. With young workers from Eastern Europe, he opened sluices from the sea and set up a damming system to control the water flow. He shared the secrets of salt: how to measure evaporation levels and determine the correct salt density and water temperature, when to add water and to rake and skim.

Two years later, Necton, the salt company that Navalho created here, produced its first salt crop. Now it is one of the region’s new salt pioneers, struggling to revive what was once a flourishing trade in this part of Portugal. They are trying to persuade consumers of the health and taste benefits of handmade, nonindustrial salt and to compete in an increasingly sophisticated global salt market. “Life begins in the ocean,” Navalho said. “What we are selling is ocean salt water without the water. Call it sea dust.”

To many people, salt is salt. But to those for whom it is a gourmet condiment, few varieties compare to the crème de la crème of salt known as fleur de sel, harvested by gently skimming the white, lacy film from the surface of salty beds when weather conditions in summer allow.

RTFA. Lots of interesting history. A fair piece of info about the craft.

I have a favorite sea salt – though I won’t bring it up since it has naught to do with the article. I think all the methods and styles have a place – just like all the denominations of olive oil or where your favorite scallops grow. The flavor is in the taste buds of the taster.

A study by Richard Abrams at Washington University demonstrates that humans more thoroughly inspect objects when their hands are near the object rather than farther away from it. This reflexive, non-conscious difference in information processing exists, they posit, because humans need to be able to analyze objects near their hands, to figure out how to handle the objects or to provide protection against them.

Recognizing that the location of your hands influences what you see is a new insight into the wiring of the brain, one that could lead to rethinking current rehabilitative therapy techniques and prosthetic design.

For a stroke victim trying to regain use of a paralyzed hand, just placing the good hand next to the desired object could help the injured hand grasp it.

Likewise, prosthetics could be redesigned to include additional information flow from the hand to the brain, rather than just the brain controlling the spatial location of the prosthetic, as with today’s artificial limb technology…

Abrams compares this new mode of information processing to the robotic arm on a space vehicle. The camera on the end of the arm sends an image to the operator about its surroundings, allowing the operator to guide the arm into position.

“The engineers who designed the arm knew that positioning it would be easier if they had the camera right in hand,” he said. “What we didn’t know until now was that humans have a mechanism for doing this, too.”

Makes good sense to me. Which is why we might ask – why didn’t someone check this out earlier?

Canadian military and police are investigating after a package containing a brand new hand grenade, belonging to the army, was found in a suburban backyard.

A woman in the Edmonton, Alberta, discovered the suspicious package on Sunday and took it to her local police station, where officers told her to carefully place it on the lawn.

Police called in the bomb squad, which determined the item was a grenade, still in its packaging and belonging to the Canadian military…

Edmonton police spokeswoman Patrycia Chalupczynska said, “We want to advise people that if they ever do find something suspicious-looking, they shouldn’t touch it — just leave it alone and call police.”

NSS!