The actor was widely reported to have been born in 1910 -- which would have made him 95 or 96 -- but his son Ted Lewis said Saturday that his father was born in 1923.

Lewis, with his wife at his bedside, passed away Friday night, said Bernard White, program director at WBAI-FM, where the actor hosted a weekly radio program. White made the announcement on the air during the Saturday slot where Lewis usually appeared.

"To say that we will miss his generous, cantankerous, engaging spirit is a profound understatement," White said.

Lewis, sporting a somewhat cheesy Dracula outfit, became a pop culture icon playing the irascible father-in-law to Fred Gwynne's ever-bumbling Herman Munster on the 1964-66 television show. He was also one of the stars of another classic TV comedy, playing Officer Leo Schnauzer on "Car 54, Where Are You?" (Watch scenes from Lewis' life -- :41)

But Lewis' life off the small screen ranged far beyond his acting antics. A former ballplayer at Thomas Jefferson High School, he achieved notoriety as a basketball talent scout familiar to coaching greats like Jerry Tarkanian and Red Auerbach.

He operated a successful Greenwich Village restaurant, Grandpa's, where he was a regular presence -- chatting with customers, posing for pictures, signing autographs.

A ponytailed Lewis ran as the Green Party candidate against incumbent Gov. George Pataki. Lewis campaigned against draconian drug laws and the death penalty, while going to court in a losing battle to have his name appear on the ballot as "Grandpa Al Lewis."

He didn't defeat Pataki, but managed to collect more 52,000 votes.

Lewis was born Alexander Meister in upstate New York before his family moved to Brooklyn, where the 6-foot-1 teen began a lifelong love affair with basketball. He later became a vaudeville and circus performer, but his career didn't take off until television did the same.

Lewis, as Officer Schnauzer, played opposite Gwynne's Officer Francis Muldoon in "Car 54, Where Are You?" -- a comedy about a Bronx police precinct that aired from 1961-63. One year later, the duo appeared together in "The Munsters," taking up residence at the fictional 1313 Mockingbird Lane.

The series, about a family of clueless creatures plunked down in middle America, was a success and ran through 1966. It forever locked Lewis in as the memorably twisted character; decades later, strangers would greet him on the street with shouts of "Grandpa!"

Unlike some television stars, Lewis never complained about getting typecast and made appearances in character for decades.

"Why would I mind?" he asked in a 1997 interview. "It pays my mortgage."

Lewis rarely slowed down, opening his restaurant and hosting his WBAI radio program. At one point during the '90s, he was a frequent guest on the Howard Stern radio show, once sending the shock jock diving for the delay button by leading an undeniably obscene chant against the Federal Communications Commission.

He also popped up in a number of movies, including the acclaimed "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?" and "Married to the Mob." Lewis reprised his role of Schnauzer in the movie remake of "Car 54," and appeared as a guest star on television shows such as "Taxi," "Green Acres" and "Lost in Space."

But in 2003, Lewis was hospitalized for an angioplasty. Complications during surgery led to an emergency bypass and the amputation of his right leg below the knee and all the toes on his left foot. Lewis spent the next month in a coma.

A year later, he was back offering his recollections of a seminal punk band on the DVD "Ramones Raw."

He is survived by his wife, Karen Ingenthron-Lewis, three sons and four grandchildren.

'Grandpa Munster' dead - Feb 5, 2006

"I hope the successful operation will help other people like me to live again," said Isabelle Dinoire, 38, who was disfigured when she was attacked by her pet Labrador retriever.

"I now have a face like everyone else," she told reporters Monday at the hospital in Amiens in northern France where the surgery was performed. "A door to the future is opening."

Her speech was heavily slurred and hard to understand, and she appeared to have difficulty moving or closing her mouth.

But the divorced mother of two teenage daughters told how a dog bite left her disfigured, and she thanked the family of the donor who gave her new lips, a chin and nose.

Fine scar lines could be seen from her nose over her cheekbones down to her jaw where the tissue was attached in a 15-hour operation on November 27.

"I can open my mouth and eat. I feel my lips, my nose and my mouth," she said.

During the news conference, while one of her surgeons was speaking, she lifted a cup to her lips and appeared to drink.

"I want to resume a normal life," Dinoire said. "I pay homage to the donor's family. ... My operation could help others to live again."

Face patient wants 'normal life'

There was a time when the main topic of conversation at the farmers' favorite breakfast or lunch place was the weather, and, if everyone was agreeable with the topic, the current state of government affairs. Now, it's all about fuel costs And it's certainly not as if there is little else of importance occurring in agriculture. In the past few months alone, the United States' chief negotiator in World Trade Organization talks has suggested eliminating all U.S. farm subsidies.
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And, closer to home, Secretary of Agriculture Mike Johanns has been crisscrossing the country, conducting a number of farm bill “listening” sessions. How much listening is actually going on at these sessions is debatable, as the Secretary always reveals in his closing statement that the die pretty much is already cast as far as how world trade will dictate the direction of the next farm bill.

But these are things that will affect farmers in the future, although the not-too-distant future. Fuel bills are in the here and now — they're in the hands of growers, they have to be paid, and they're shockingly high. What's more, we're being told that fuel costs will only get higher, and that there's no relief in sight.

So it's time we began taking a serious look at long-term solutions to the current fuel crisis, and that was part of the purpose of the recent Alabama Agriculture Energy Conference, held at Auburn University.

The message brought by Alabama Agriculture Commissioner Ron Sparks was that the solutions to our fuel problems are readily available — it's just a matter of taking advantage of them. Alabama, he said, is a potential treasure trove of biofuels, and it's past time for the state's economy — particularly the farm sector — started profiting from them.

“The technology is there,” says Sparks. “But there has got to be a commitment by farmers, the government and consumers for all of this to work.”

Education, he adds, is key to the success of biofuels. Farmers need to know what's available, where the opportunities lie, and what's still needed.

One thing that is not lacking, however, are the raw materials, with many of the products commonly used to produce biofuels already being grown in abundance throughout Alabama.

For example, in the course of producing 1 billion chickens each year, the state's poultry farmers also generate an enormous supply of poultry waste, which many biofuel experts believe could ultimately serve as a cheap, widely available biofuel source.

Alabama also is well known for its prolific produc... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

Change of mindset necessary for biofuels to reach potential

Suppose that over the next year the entire population of the Memphis metropolitan area were to die: 2,700-plus people gone each and every day, over a million in a year. And further imagine that another 200 million-plus, more than half the population of the entire U.S., were made chronically ill and, in a majority of those cases, unable to work.

Then consider that it was all caused by a disease that could have been eliminated through use of a common, cheap chemical, but the government refused to allow it, even though no scientific evidence had ever shown it to have caused harm to humans.

Imagine the outcry.

Such a scenario is being played out over much of the globe: One million to three million people dead annually, 200 million to 300 chronically ill from malaria, because governments won't allow the use of the pesticide DDT to kill mosquitoes that carry the disease.

That DDT was ever banned in the first place is yet another farce of the Nixon era, when Environmental Protection Agency Administrator William Ruckelshaus arbitrarily decreed that it be removed from use — despite extensive hearings that concluded it posed no danger to human health and a judge's ruling that it shouldn't be banned. Ruckleshaus, it is reported, refused to attend the hearings or to read one word of the more than 9,000 pages of testimony from more than 125 witnesses.

The ban on DDT, widely used on crops, was a direct outgrowth of the public hysteria regarding all things chemical that followed publication of Rachel Carson's book, “Silent Spring,” in which she painted lurid pictures of landscapes devoid of bird songs and a human population rife with cancers from exposure to pesticides and chemicals.

Although there was some questionable evidence that DDT, in large quantities, caused thinning of the shells of the eggs of some bird species (this is still being debated in the scientific community), there was not then — nor now — one scintilla of scientific proof that DDT had caused a single human death or a single human cancer.

But DDT became a cause for environmental organizations, and their relentless campaigns have been a major influence in it being banned in the U.S. and many other countries.

They could afford to be holier-than-thou; malaria had been eliminated in the U.S. prior to DDT being outlawed. But for much of the rest of the world — especially Third World nations — the loss of DDT saw the number of malaria cases begin skyrocketing. And deaths.

Efforts are now afoot to ban DDT worldwide, a move that would condemn millions more to needless suffering and death. Organizations and governments are playing politics with people's lives, denying the use of an effective, safe, cheap pesticide that has stood the test of time as the absolute best material in malaria control programs.

One small step: Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., has succeeded in pressuring the U.S. Agency for International Development to reform its inefficient, wasteful malaria programs. Another is Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates' $250 million-plus contributions to malaria research.

But now, and for the foreseeable future, DDT is a much-needed lifesaver.

Pandering to politics costs lives, lost productivity

It’s not unrealistic to assume that by 2025, agriculture will be supplying as much as 35 percent of the U.S. energy supply, says David Bransby, an Auburn University professor of agronomy and soils and a nationally recognized authority on biofuel alternatives.

Bransby spoke at the recent Alabama Agriculture Energy Conference held in Auburn.

“The United States accounts for 25 percent of the global consumption of oil, but we own only 3 percent, making us critically vulnerable,” says Bransby. “We import more than 60 percent of what we use, and 15 percent of that comes from the unstable Middle East. It’s not possible to replace that 60 percent, but it is possible to replace that 15 percent.”

Biofuels won’t solve these problems completely, but they certainly can help, he says. “If the recent hurricanes aren’t a ‘wake-up call,’ then I don’t know what it’ll take. It’ll fall back on us down here, and if we have to do it without Washington, then we’ll do it. We have to do something. Rural America will respond a heck of a lot faster than Washington,” says Bransby.

Read more...

David Bransby believes that by the year 2025 agriculture could be supply as much as 35 percent of the U.S. energy supply

Humans who smell a pillow, shirt, shoe or other object that was in close contact with another person may be reminded of a certain someone. New research suggests squirrels have a similar ability to not only associate smells with particular squirrels, but to also create mental images of them.

The study, published in this month's Animal Behavior, represents the first time the ability has been demonstrated in rodents. A second, not-yet-published study by other researchers indicates hamsters also have the skill.

Like humans, squirrels must first be familiar with an individual before an odor can become associated with that other animal. A husband, for example, could smell his wife's perfume in an elevator and be reminded of her, but a perfume he has never smelled before could trigger no such memories.

"Squirrels need to be familiar with others to be able to put all of an individual's odors into a representation of that individual, as if repeated interactions make that individual meaningful, and thus worthy of remembering at this level," explained Jill Mateo, who conducted the research.

Odors Trigger Memory In Squirrels

Feces from healthy humans contains live viruses, most of which are plant viruses that have the ability to sicken and deform plants, according to a study published in the current Public Library of Science Biology journal.

The finding could lead to warnings about the use of human waste as fertilizer. Collected water, otherwise known as "reclaimed" or "gray" water, may also contain deadly plant viruses, but future studies are needed to determine if such water, which is sometimes used for irrigation, can infect plants.

Human Feces Sickens Plants

King Tutankhamun died of an infection set in by a wound in the left knee, according reports in the Italian press which disclose the conclusions of new research on the 3,300-year-old boy pharaoh.

Eduard Egarter Vigl and Paul Gostner, head of radiology at Bolzano General Hospital were both members of the Egyptian-led research team that last year begun examining King Tut's CT scan images.

They found compelling new evidence for a deadly infection after examining three-dimensional images of the left knee and foot, the local daily Alto Adige reported.

The CT scan revealed that King Tut's kneecap was broken, as well as his left foot. Moreover, the embalming liquid had entered the spaces within the knee fracture, a clear sign that the pharaoh was mummified when the wounds were still open.

Infection Killed King Tut

According to a post on Boing Boing, Steve Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) has posted the US National Security Agency's guide to sanitizing Word and PDF documents.
With high-profile PDF censorship gaffes in the last few years due to misunderstandings about the technology, this PDF guide produced by the NSA cites common information leakages and includes a step-by-step guide on the censorship of Word documents and the subsequent conversion to PDF.

Ubiquitous PDF: Scrub documents the NSA way!

That's right. The HP ScanJet 4c's SCL (Scanner Control Language) command set includes an unofficial PLAY TUNE command. I stumbled across this after reading an article on the ScanJet 4c in the feb. 1997 issue of HP Journal (see the sidebar Sing to Me).

The PLAY TUNE command basically varies the stepping rate of the scanner motor to produce audible frequencies. All it needs is a series of note frequencies and durations previously written to its SCSI buffer. The ScanJetPlay utility resulted from my efforts in trying out this easter egg. Check dis shit out, babee! :^)

ScanJetPlay requires libsane and libsanei (for SCSI access) from the SANE backends package. Note that libsanei and its header files is not installed per default, and must be done manually.

Video here...

http://www.ghana-projects.de/scanjet-elise2.mpg

This just sounds so cool ... :)

ScanJet Music