Beginning in spring of 2007, a mystery vandal visited businesses at night, pressing his naked behind — sometimes his groin, sometimes both — on windows. The marks were made with lotion or petroleum jelly, and while police had earlier worried copycat criminals were getting involved, Scott said they now believe it’s “the act of a lone deviant.”

“This isn’t normal behavior for Valentine, Neb.,” Scott said. “It’s an embarrassment for the hardworking people who live here.”

The man was spotted by police about 3:30 a.m. Wednesday and arrested without incident, Scott said. The suspect appears to be the same man caught on a surveillance camera at the middle school last year, he said.

Valentine, a town of about 2,650 in remote north-central Nebraska, lies near the scenic Niobrara River. The city was named one of the top “wilderness” towns in the country last year by National Geographic Adventure magazine.

People from around the country send Valentine’s Day cards to the city’s post office so they can be mailed out with the word “Valentine” stamped on them.

The past two summers, the bandit struck business after business, window after window.

He stopped over the fall and winter.

During one particularly brazen session, virtually all the windows at a local hotel were imprinted.

Stovall said he was so impressed by the casket he wanted to lie down in it for a while.

Embalmer Stephanie Van Oppen explained the apparent irreverence by saying the staff wanted people to have fun at the funeral home for once, and get to know that its employees aren’t creepy and weird.

Nearly 300 people from Peoria and Tazewell counties attended the bash.

“We put in a walkway, and part of that collapsed due to Grumpy’s efforts,” preservationist Thomas Mudd told The Saginaw News.

Construction workers leveled a mound of soil that Grumpy the Groundhog had settled into, “but Grumpy still has his hole under the handicap ramp,” Mudd said.

Mudd’s latest tactic is to use fox urine as a groundhog repellent. But other efforts have failed to rid the pest in the past. Mudd tried evicting Grumpy with ammonia and mothballs, but the animal dumped the offending materials outside of his tunnel.

A few years ago, Mudd said he baited a trap with broccoli, caught Grumpy and took him to a wooded park near the Tittabawassee River.

“I waved good-bye to Grumpy, and I was so happy,” Mudd said.

Grumpy was back within a week.

“This is a game for Grumpy,” Mudd said. “Grumpy was almost happy to see me. We were back to the old battle.”

Despite the epic conflict, Grumpy has become something of a mascot for the Cushway House.

So adorable, in fact, that young students touring the building lose interest in the historical information once Mudd brings up Grumpy.

“I’ve learned my lesson not to mention Grumpy until the very last,” Mudd said.

Chippewa Indian groups have suggested that Grumpy possibly is the home’s protector spirit.

“It makes it tough to put the fox urine on him,” Mudd said.

___

Information from: The Saginaw News, http://www.mlive.com

The 12 had no martial arts experience but joined a team of genuine kung fu performers from a school in Henan province, also home to the 1,500-year-old temple, that was leaving for a tour of Canada, the official Xinhua News Agency said.

They had paid up to $90,000 each to a human smuggler, or “snakehead,” and two coaches from the martial arts school who often accompany students on trips abroad, Xinhua said.

The teenagers, ages 17 to 19, had a one-day training session at a hotel on June 24 to learn the basics of the art of Chinese lion dancing, Xinhua said.

The group was stopped less than a week later while trying to enter Hong Kong after border guards’ suspicions were aroused, but the report did not give any details.

Xinhua quoted a policeman in Changle, a city in eastern China’s Fujian province from which the alleged bogus kung fu masters originally came, as saying the Shaolin Temple had been an innocent victim of the conspirators.

“The Shaolin Temple had nothing to do with it,” Xinhua quoted the officer, identified by his surname, Wang, as saying.

The teens and the two coaches were detained and returned to Fujian for interrogation, the agency said. The snakehead was arrested Monday after six weeks on the run.

The Shaolin Temple has fought hard against those it sees as exploiting its name for martial arts schools, performances, movies and consumer products.

In recent years, it has set up a corporation, Henan Shaolin Temple Industrial Development Ltd., and trademarked the names “Shaolin” and “Shaolin Temple.”

Chillout, its owners say, is the Middle East’s first ice lounge — the latest venture in this desert Gulf emirate, which has been transformed by a mania for the biggest, first or most outlandish.

Gulf men in traditional white robes with wives covered in black cloaks, teenagers eager to experience their first cold blast and Westerners who miss the chill are flocking to the bar-restaurant to hang out in what amounts to a freezer.

Everything is made of ice: the walls, tables and chairs; cups, glasses and plates; the art on the wall, the sculptures depicting Dubai’s skyline, the beaded curtains, the 7-foot-chandelier and the bar.

“It was the first time that I’ve been in such a cold place,” said Fatima Ali, a 13-year-old Emirati, as she emerged from the restaurant, still breathless from the adventure. “It was fantastic. I took pictures to show my friends so they would come too.”

Not everyone is so impressed. Some rush out after only a few minutes in the 21-degree temperature.

The $17 cover charge gets you one drink and the rental of a hooded parka, woolen gloves and insulated shoes. Customers don them outside, then spend a few minutes in the Buffer Zone, a room set at 41 degrees to adjust before entering the restaurant.

Sami al-Muhaideb, a 25-year-old Saudi travel agent, warned his friend Yousef Badr going in to expect a blast of cold air, like a freezer. Thirty minutes later, Badr emerged shivering, with a red nose.

Hamdan, 22, who works at Dubai customs, looked miserable as he sipped hot chocolate, an extra parka covering his legs. He hadn’t quite dressed for the occasion, coming in a T-shirt and Bermuda shorts.

“He’s not happy,” his colleague Marwa Kharsa, a 25-year-old from Atlanta, said with a laugh. “But I’m extremely happy. I miss the cold.”

While the new, $3 million hangout, which opened in a Dubai mall in June, is expected to become a must-see tourist destination, it also is expected to raise questions about already high energy consumption in this desert land.

The average person in the Emirates puts more demand on the global ecosystem than any other in the world, according to the World Wildlife Fund.

Energy consumption in the Emirates runs high for many reasons, particularly because of the air conditioning that cools houses, malls, cars and public places not only during the furnace-hot summers but in the warm winters.

Making matters worse are Dubai’s audacious developments. The emirate has transformed itself into a financial and tourism center, building up its name with dramatic projects — the world’s tallest skyscraper, island resorts in the shape of palm trees and maps of the world, even an indoor ski slope that still creates snow amid the inferno of summer.

Mike Ebenezer, business manager at Sharaf Group, which owns Chillout, insists it consumes only as much energy as a cold storage facility for frozen foods does.

“There are hundreds of cold storages in Dubai,” said Ebenezer.

Ebenezer said that Chillout is the ninth such ice bar in the world, with others in the U.S., Sweden, Australia, New Zealand, London and Italy.

“It’s a cool oasis in the middle of the desert,” said Ebenezer.

“We want it to be a fashion and lifestyle statement for the Dubai people,” he added. “It’s the kind of place where you want to be seen.”

It took 40,000 tons of ice to build the decor of the 2,400-square-foot restaurant. Every item was designed, carved and cut at a studio freezer at Iceculture Inc. in Canada and then shipped to Dubai.

Diffused lighting, from low-heat LED bulbs, constantly changes colors as it filters through the ice blocks. Sheepskin rugs cover the seats for the diners’ comfort. Cocktails — which are nonalcoholic in a nod to Muslim culture — are served in ice glasses that are later discarded.

Hot drinks and food, from an Asian fusion menu, are served in stainless steel thermos containers — but still get cold within 15 minutes, diners are warned.

Putting on their parkas, newlywed Lebanese couple Yousef and Obeida Bissani, who live in Dubai, said they are used to cold winters in Lebanon but wanted to see what it’s like to sit on an ice bench and drink from an ice glass.

“We didn’t want to go to Ski Dubai because we have (the Lebanese) ski resort of Faraya,” said Obeida Bissani, 23, who works in advertising.

Thuraya Amory, a 24-year-old Moroccan who works in sales, brought her mother, Amina, who was visiting from their homeland.

“It’s the first time that I experience cold in Dubai,” she said. “It’s nice to do it from time to time.”

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By DONNA ABU-NASR, Associated Press Writer

On the Net:

http://www.iceculture.com

Time briefly stood still as the clock’s hands were frozen shortly after 8 a.m. They then were wound to 12 o’clock as a team of specialist “industrial rope-access technicians” descended to clean the clock’s four latticework faces, part of maintenance ahead of its 150th anniversary in 2009.

Although the clock soon will be ticking again, the famed bell that sounds the hour at Britain’s Houses of Parliament will be silent for four to six weeks as engineers replace bearings in the clock mechanism.

This is the first time since 1956 that both Big Ben’s sonorous hourly bongs and the chimes that mark each quarter-hour will be silent, robbing London of one of its most distinctive sounds.

Parliament’s neo-Gothic clock tower, designed by Charles Barry, is popularly known as Big Ben, although the name refers only to the 13.5 ton Great Bell inside.

Cast at the Whitechapel Foundry in east London, Big Ben first rang out in July 1859. Soon after, it cracked — as an earlier version had during testing. Officials simply turned the bell so the hammer wouldn’t strike the crack. That same bell, crack and all, remains in use.

___

On the Net:

Big Ben and the clock: http://www.parliament.uk/about/history/big_ben.cfm

Martel, who wrote the novel “Life of Pi,” was upset that Harper had paid no attention during a recent parliamentary ceremony to honor Canadian artists.

Harper, whose Conservatives won the January 2006 election, is a rather wooden figure who has expressed little enthusiasm for the arts.

“What makes him tick? No doubt he is busy. No doubt he is deluded by that busyness. No doubt being Prime Minister fills his entire consideration and froths his sense of busied importance to the very brim. And no doubt he sounds and governs like one who cares not a jot for the arts,” wrote Martel.

“But he must have moments of stillness … For as long as Stephen Harper is Prime Minister of Canada, I vow to send him every two weeks, mailed on a Monday, a book that has been known to expand stillness.”

The first book Martel sent Harper was “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” by Russian author Leo Tolstoy. Those wishing to keep in touch with Martel’s campaign can log on to http://whatisstephenharperreading.ca.

No one in Harper’s press office was immediately available for comment.

Many Malaysians are willing to suspend disbelief when dealing with the supernatural, and the exhibitions capitalise on a widespread fascination with the ghouls and goblins that populate Malaysia’s legends and folklore.

But supernatural beings should not be played up in exhibitions, state news agency Bernama quoted the chairman of Malaysia’s National Fatwa Council as saying.

“They are beyond the comprehension of the human mind as they involve the invisible world,” Abdul Shukor Husain said.

“We don’t want to promote a belief in the supernatural and in superstition, which we do not know about. So we do not need to focus on such things or play them up by having such exhibitions.”

Just over half of Malaysia’s population is Muslim. The National Fatwa Council, made up of respected Islamic scholars, is the main body that issues religious edicts (fatwas).

Malaysian government officials have already called for a halt to one such exhibition in a state museum that has put on display decaying artefacts described as the carcasses of a genie and a mythical phoenix bird.

Last year more than 200,000 people flocked to an exhibition of about 100 coffins, ghosts and genies that organisers claimed included relics of mermaids and vampires.

“The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification” was named the winner Friday of the Bookseller/Diagram Prize for oddest book title.

The book, written by Buffalo, N.Y.-based artist Julian Montague and published by Harry N. Abrams, offers a mock-scientific taxonomy of the varieties of lost shopping carts, from the simply discarded to the elaborately vandalized.

“Then there’s plow crush — where a cart gets crushed by a snow plow — and train crush,” Montague said.

“Stray Shopping Carts” received a third of the more than 5,500 votes cast by members of the public on the Web site of trade magazine The Bookseller.

“It’s a sort of strange honor to have,” Montague said. “But I welcome the publicity and it’s nice that people are finding out my book exists.”

Runner-up was “Tattooed Mountain Women and Spoon Boxes of Daghestan,” by Robert Chenciner, Gabib Ismailov, Magomedkhan Magomedkhanov and Alex Binnie (Bennett & Bloom).

Other finalists were “How Green Were the Nazis?” by Franz-Josef Bruggemeier, Mark Cioc and Thomas Zeller (Ohio University Press) a study of the environmental policies of the Third Reich; “Di Mascio’s Delicious Ice Cream: Di Mascio of Coventry: an Ice Cream Company of Repute, with an Interesting and Varied Fleet of Ice Cream Vans,” by Roger De Boer, Harvey Francis Pitcher, and Alan Wilkinson (Past Masters); “Proceedings of the Eighteenth International Seaweed Symposium” (Kluwer); and “Better Never To Have Been: the Harm of Coming Into Existence,” by David Benatar (Clarendon Press).

Writer Ellis Kaut is unhappy that illustrator Barbara von Johnson has given her support to a local TV show’s contest to design a girlfriend for Pumuckl.

The winner will get to visit von Johnson’s Munich villa and take part in a “wedding” staged for the popular fictional character.

Von Johnson says Pumuckl deserves a girlfriend after more than 40 years of fooling around in books and on the radio and television. However, Kaut says the cheeky imp must stay true to his spirit nature.

“Pumuckl is a pure child of fantasy, a spiritual being, and he must remain that way,” Kaut said in part of a statement published by the Munich court where Kaut and von Johnson will go head to head.

“Fundamentally, spiritual beings have no discernable gender. They are not born … they do not grow old. They take part in good or bad frolicking, but frolicking without sexuality.”

According to his fans’ website Pumuckl is also known in Spain, Hungary and Greece. In the stories, the mischievous imp lives in Master Eder’s workshop in Munich and likes to make rhymes and get up to naughty tricks.

They said their findings — which look at how plants absorb and reflect different types of light — may help narrow the search for life on planets beyond our solar system.

And, as a bonus, they may have answered a basic question about life on Earth.

“We’ve uncovered maybe the best explanation of why plants are green,” said Nancy Kiang, a NASA biometeorologist who led the study, which appears in the journal Astrobiology.

Understanding plant colours on other planets is important as scientists prepare for new information to be generated from giant space telescopes planned by NASA and the European Space Agency to study Earth-sized planets orbiting other stars.

“We can guess the plausible range of colours they might be,” said Vikki Meadows, an astrobiologist the California Institute of Technology who heads NASA’s Virtual Planetary Laboratory.

Meadows and a host of scientists from different disciplines first studied how light is absorbed and reflected by plants and some bacteria on Earth.

That led to computer model for predicting the colour of plants on other planets and new insights about plants on Earth.

Chlorophyll in plants takes light from the sun and converts it into energy through a process called photosynthesis.

Scientists have long known that most plants on Earth absorb more blue and red light and less green light, but they have not understood why.

It turns out that more red light reaches plants on Earth, and blue light is the easiest to absorb. So plants make most efficient use of these two, and that leaves green light as largely superfluous.

“They don’t absorb the green because they have more than enough light from blue and red. They just don’t need green,” Kiang said.

As a result, plants reflect away relatively more green light, which is why plants appear green.

“It turns out plants are actually using the best light there is,” Kiang said.

On other planets, where other colours of the light spectrum might dominate, the plants might soak up more green or even more blue light and reflect back whatever is not needed for energy.

The scientists believe the same rules will apply on Earth-like planets in other solar systems.

“It turns out that photosynthesis is one of those things that is likely to be common. If we look for life on other planets, we will try to look for signs of photosynthesis,” Meadows said.

“The Legend of Bruce Lee,” with a budget of just $6.4 million, started production at the weekend in the southern province of Guangdong.

Lee made 46 kungfu movies and brought Hong Kong move making to the world’s attention. He died at age 32 in 1973, while starring in and directing “Game of Death” in Hong Kong.

Chan Kwok-kwan, who plays Lee in the TV series, said he had mixed feelings about playing the role of an icon.

“I’m nervous and also excited, but I will do my best,” Xinhua quoted him as saying.

The Hollywood memorabilia firm Profiles in History said it had sold more than $2 million worth of movie and television items in a Thursday auction.

The rare Winkie costume was used by an actor portraying a guard protecting the Wicked Witch of the West in the much beloved “Wizard of Oz”. It was within its estimated price range of $100,000 to $120,000, but the Superman costume from the 1978 movie soared past its $50,000 to $70,000 estimated price.

By contrast, the costume worn by actor George Reeves in the 1950s television series “The Adventures of Superman” brought in $129,800 in 2003.

A Batsuit from 1995′s “Batman Forever” brought $63,250 and an alien creature costume from 1979′s “Alien” $126,500.

The magazine quoted French researchers who analysed the relics and found they did not appear to be the burnt remains of anyone from the 15th century, but in fact dated to more than 2,000 years ago.

A vanilla smell suggests natural decomposition, not burning, the magazine quotes Philippe Charlier, a forensic scientist at Raymond Poincare Hospital in Garches, as saying.

Joan of Arc was burned at the stake in 1431 in Rouen. The so-called relics were discovered in 1867 in a jar in the attic of a Paris pharmacy. The Roman Catholic Church formally recognised them and they are kept in a museum in Chinon, France, that belongs to the Archdiocese of Tours.

They include a blackened human rib, a cat’s leg bone, some black chunks and a fragment of linen. Cats were often embalmed in ancient Egypt, but were also sometimes burned at the stake with accused witches in medieval Europe.

Charlier was allowed to study the relics last year and said he was astonished by the results. “I’d never have thought that it could be from a mummy,” Nature quoted him as saying.

His team used several spectrometry devices to analyse the pieces. They also used a uniquely Gallic technique — the noses of two famed perfumiers.

Both smelled hints of burnt plaster and vanilla.

Charlier said the plaster smell supported reports Joan of Arc was burnt on a plaster stake, instead of wood, to make the process last longer. But vanilla smells do not.

“Vanillin is produced during decomposition of a body,” Charlier said. “You would find it in a mummy, but not in someone who was burnt.”

“I see burnt remains all the time in my job,” Charlier said. “It was obviously not burnt tissue.”

Other evidence also pointed to an Egyptian mummy — including the presence of pine pollen. Pine trees did not grow in Normandy at the time Joan of Arc was killed, but pine resin was used widely in Egypt during embalming, according to the report.

Carbon-14 analysis dated the remains to between 300 and 600 BC. The spectrometry profiles of the rib, femur and black chunks matched those from Egyptian mummies from the period and not those of burnt bones, Charlier said.