Eideard

A woman returned to her Cumbrian home to find a near perfect imprint of an owl on her window.

The bird had apparently crashed into the window of Sally Arnold’s Kendal home, leaving the bizarre image – complete with eyes, beak and feathers.

Experts said the silhouette was left by the bird’s “powder down” – a substance protecting growing feathers.

Mrs Arnold said she could find no sign of the owl, so assumed it had flown off without serious injury.

She said: “Our first concern was for the welfare of what we suspected was an owl and we opened up the window to check if it was still around. Fortunately, there was no sign of the bird and we can only assume that it had flown away probably suffering from a headache…”

Val Osborne, head of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) wildlife inquiries team, said: “We don’t very often see an imprint of a bird that’s flown into a window that’s this clear and where it’s pretty obvious exactly what kind of bird it is.

“This would have been very uncomfortable for the bird but thankfully it looks like it survived as Mr and Mrs Arnold couldn’t find it anywhere close by.”

I can think of a couple things this owl might have said – other than “oops!”

This picture isn’t something you see every day, and it’s something there’ll only be one more chance to capture: a Space Shuttle launch photographed from an in-flight passenger jet. Stefanie Gordon shot this image of the Space Shuttle Endeavour’s launch with her iPhone as her plane descended for a landing.

The shot itself is a rare enough event, but what happened next was an eye-opener for the photographer. According to Mashable, within a few hours of uploading the launch pics to Twitter from her iPhone, Stephanie was getting phone calls from ABC, CNBC and the BBC. Her follower count on Twitter went up by over 1000, and she was getting so many @mentions as a result of the pic that she had to shut them off so her iPhone’s battery didn’t get drained.

Other people on the plane took pics, but apparently none of them uploaded them to Twitter. The real draw of this story isn’t that the photo was taken with an iPhone — people use the device to take extraordinary pics all the time — but the colossal and immediate response the photographer got after sharing it. This scenario shows just how interconnected everything has become today thanks to devices like the iPhone, and it’s a trend that’s only going to become more powerful as more people start sharing information this way.

Go ahead. Tempt me to make something more than incidental use of Twitter and Facebook.

It’s pretty difficult to change a hermit into a sociable old curmudgeon.

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.

Does breaking a window count as art? Yes, murmured the 50 or so artniks who recently crowded into a former Edinburgh ambulance garage to view a film of sculptor Kevin Harman doing just that. No, insisted Kate Gray, director of the Collective Gallery in Cockburn Street, whose window it was.

The courts are on Gray’s side. [Phew!] Yesterday Harman, a prize-winning graduate of Edinburgh College of Art, was fined £200 for breaching the peace on 23 November, when he smashed a metal scaffolding pole through one of the gallery’s windows. Fiscal depute Malcolm Stewart described the affair as “a rather bizarre incident” which had left Collective staff “upset.”

As Harman, 27, had already paid £350 to have the window instantly replaced, his artistic intervention has proved pricey. The Collective’s decision to prosecute was promptly condemned by Harman’s supporters.

Hopefully, they’ll all chip in to pay the fine for him. No doubt they can afford it.

Gray was unavailable for comment, as was the Edinburgh College of Art, where Harman is in the second year of a master’s course. It is understood that several of his tutors had been supportive of the project, which was initially labelled Brick. The scaffolding pole was substituted as a safer option.

The student, who has a piece in the current show of the Royal Scottish Academy, explained that he was less distressed by the fine than by the Collective’s dismissal of his work as “vandalism”, as the charge sheet put it. “There have got to be serious questions asked of their position as arbiters of art,” he told the Guardian.

His question places him thoroughly in the school which claims graffiti and similar acts of onanistic scribbling – as art. Sadly, if he went to court here in Santa Fe, he would have had a 50-50 chance of getting off.

There is a class of art snob that specializes in categorizing crap as valuable. Mostly because they’re incapable of creating anything lasting on their own.

Here she was last year, when any idiot could clearly make her out.

An image many of the faithful took as a miraculous manifestation of the Virgin Mary is fading from the window at Mercy Hospital where it appeared in September 2008.

The rainbow-hued image is slowly being replaced by a white crystalline residue, said Mark M. Fulco, senior vice president for strategy and marketing at Mercy. The fading bolsters expert opinion that the image was caused by moisture infiltrating between the panes of glass through a faulty rubber seal.

Now that the window has been removed and stored, the water is evaporating and leaving behind the white residue.

[Last year,] word of the image spread quickly. Soon large crowds had gathered in the parking lot below, many clutching pictures of Mary or reciting the Lord’s Prayer in a number of languages. A makeshift shrine of flowers and votive candles grew near the building entrance.

The vision placed Mercy, a Catholic institution affiliated with the Sisters of Providence, in a quandary because the devotion was holding up the window replacement work. After eight days, Mercy had workers gingerly remove the window, place it in a specially built case and take it to a storage location that Fulco said he cannot identify even to this day for fear of crowds gathering at the storage site.

This last paragraph borders on the hilarious. I can just hear the workmen muttering, “Cripes!”

Thieves stole a suitcase containing $1.5 million in diamonds from a rental car parked in a drugstore parking lot in Albuquerque, police say.

The theft took place in less than three minutes while the North Carolina diamond broker was inside using the restroom.

When he returned to his rental car, Peter Kaplan, 64, New Port, N.C., found someone had punched through the rear passenger window and taken his black Samsonite suitcase with 150 stones and 70 rings…

Police learned the parking lot surveillance video “went black” about 10 minutes before the heist and started back up an hour later.

“For somebody to be able to pick that spot and to have a camera black out for them to commit the crime, is one in a million,” Alvarado said.

Nothing one-in-a-million about it. I haven’t heard [yet] how they “blacked-out” the security camera; but, the thieves obviously followed Kaplan to – or were waiting for him to arrive in – Albuquerque. Using today’s tech – someone tossed a cellphone with built-in GPS into the back of the car.

They used that to track him through the city. Took advantage of the opportunity when he made a stop that wasn’t one of his jewelry store clients. Made off with the diamonds.