The U.S. Forest Service is looking for the “SpongeBob fanatics” who painted the cartoon character on the chimney of a historic building.

The 10-foot tall painting of Nickelodeon character SpongeBob SquarePants is on a cabin in the Pike National Forest that used to be the Forest Service’s tree nursery until it was abandoned in the 1930s. Forest Service law enforcement officer Tom Healy says the incident is part of an increase in vandalism in the area.

Officials say whoever painted the cartoon on the chimney brought four colors of paint and that it was a time-consuming venture.

Healy says it will cost several thousand dollars to wipe the animated yellow sea sponge’s image from the site.

An Australian swimmer says he survived a mauling by a 16-foot shark by wrestling with the beast, finally getting free by poking it in the eye.

The shark, believed to be a great white, seized Jason Cull by the left leg as he was swimming at Middleton Beach in southwestern Australia on Saturday.

The shark was one of three that swimmers reported seeing at the beach Saturday. Officials closed the beach after the attack.

From his hospital bed where he was treated for deep lacerations, Cull, 37, told reporters Sunday he saw a shadow moving in the water just before the attack and mistook it for a dolphin.

“It was much bigger than a dolphin when it came up,” Cull said. “It banged straight into me - I realized what it was, it was a shark.

“I sort of punched it, and it grabbed me by the leg and dragged me under the water,” he said. “I just remember being dragged backwards underwater. I felt along it, I found its eye and I poked it in the eye, and that’s when it let go.”

Fact or Fiction?

Uranus is visible to the naked eye.

Benjamin Franklin was first to suggest daylight saving.

The most abundant metal in the Earths crust is aluminium.

It snowed in the Sahara desert on 18 February 1979.

On average, an iceberg weighs 20 million tons.

The far side of the moon was first photographed by a Russian satellite in 1959.

Captain Cook was the first man to set foot on all continents except Antarctica.

The diameter of the Moon is 3 476 km.

The pressure at the Earths inner core is 3 million times Earth’s atmospheric pressure.

200 million years ago Earth contained 1 land mass called Pangaea

At the deepest point, an iron ball would take more than an hour to sink to the ocean floor. ( 11.034 km )

The largest wave ever recorded was near the Japanese Island of Ishigaki in 1971. It was recorded at 85 metres high.

Antarctic means ‘ opposite the Artic ‘.
Read the rest of this entry »

An Omaha man struggling to breathe used a steak knife to perform an at-home tracheotomy. Steve Wilder said he thought he was going to die when he awoke one night last week and couldn’t breath.

Wilder said he didn’t call 911 because he didn’t think help would arrive in time. So, the 55-year-old says, he got a steak knife from the kitchen and made a small hole in his throat, allowing air to gush in.

Wilder suffered from throat cancer and related breathing problems several years ago. About that time, he had an episode where he couldn’t breath because his air passages swelled shut. He said that’s what happened this time around.

Doctors don’t expect Wilder to suffer any adverse affects from the tracheotomy once it’s healed.