"Double Hitter"

On Aug. 17, 1957, Hall of Fame member Richie Ashburn of the Philadelphia Phillies fouled off a pitch that struck Alice Roth, wife of Philadelphia Bulletin sports editor Earl Roth, breaking her nose. As Roth was being helped from the stands, Ashburn fouled off another pitch, striking Roth as she lay on a stretcher. She was not seriously injured

Doing Battle Against the Curse

Leading, 3-0, and five outs from reaching their first World Series in 58 years, the Chicago Cubs watched spectator Steve Bartman reach for a foul ball, deflecting it away from left fielder Moises Alou. Given new life, Luis Castillo drew a walk, starting an eight-run rally that propelled the Florida Marlins to the 2003 National League championship and earned Bartman infamy in Chicago. Alou said this spring he doubts he could have caught the ball.

Celebration !!!!!

Turkey players celebrate during their Group A Euro 2008 soccer match against Czech Republic at Stade de Geneve stadium in Geneva June 15, 2008. REUTERS/Max Rossi (SWITZERLAND)

NO GOAL !!!!!!! "the agony of defeat"

Turkey's goalkeeper Volkan Demirel makes a save next to Czech Republik's Jan Polak during their Group A Euro 2008 soccer match at Stade de Geneve stadium in Geneva. REUTERS/Pascal Lauener (SWITZERLAND)

Some things take a long time

Established in 1911 by presidential proclamation, Devils Postpile National Monument protects and preserves the Devils Postpile formation, the 101-foot high Rainbow Falls, and the pristine mountain scenery in California's High Sierras. The formation is a rare sight in the geologic world and ranks as one of the world’s finest examples of columnar basalt. Its columns tower 60 feet high and display an unusual symmetry.

Approximately 100,000 years ago, a lava flow erupted two miles upstream from the location of today's Monument. As it flowed down the Valley, it eventually ran into an obstruction which served as a dam to the lava's path. Pooling up to as deep as 400 feet behind the natural dam, the lava cooled. Conditions were such that the lava--that was incredibly uniform in its mineral composition--cooled at a very slow rate. As it cooled, it contracted and cracked, forming hexagonal columns. 80,000 years later, a glacier flowed through the same valley, overriding the formation and eventually revealing the sides and tops of the columns. Glacial polish can still be seen today at the top of the formation.
Rainbow Falls

Sights on a European Road Trip and you could brag that you "stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night"

A Holiday Inn Express lies not far from this picture-perfect alpine scene north of Lucerne, Switzerland. Crossing the Alps is a cinch on today's superhighways.

The Lower Corniche near Monaco winds along the Mediterranean coast, twisting along – and sometimes through – the seaside mountains.

To Fetch a Jug of Water 1200 Years Ago

In March, Marshall Pura of Los Feliz stopped in the village of Abhaneri, India, and came across this little-known wonder from the ancient world -- a well from the 8th century. "The step well was nearly 10 stories deep, and I pictured the women carrying those large jugs down and up those 110 steps more than 1,200 years ago," he said in an e-mail to the Times. "It was completely unexpected, all these arrangements of steps going every which way." He used a Kodak Z740 to plumb the depths.

They Know They Saw Something

It was a cool, clear January night when Steve Allen, 50, and a group of friends were warming themselves around a fire of brush and debris in nearby Selden, just south of Stephenville, Texas.

They first saw a set of brilliant white lights heading from the east that looked like they were at the corners of something a mile long and a half-mile wide. The lights were quicker and quieter than anything Allen had ever seen.

"They came within a mile of us," said Allen, the owner of L&S Enterprises and Texas Freight, a local trucking company. "It flipped us all out."

The lights headed toward Stephenville, where they came to a stop. They reconfigured to form an arch "shaped like the top of a football," Allen said, and realigned into two vertical lines of randomly flashing lights. Then the object burst into a dirty white flame.

"It looked like something firing up, like a blowtorch," Allen said. "It simply vanished."

Ten minutes later, the group saw the lights coming from the opposite direction. Trailing them closely, Allen was certain, were two military jets, followed by two massive red orbs.

Allen, who as a licensed pilot was comfortable judging distance, said the lights were 3,000 feet above the ground.

When the light show was over, he went home and told his wife, who urged him to keep the encounter to himself.

D.B. Cooper bills sold at auction

Fifteen tattered $20 bills recovered from the 1971 D.B. Cooper skyjacking sold for more than 120 times their face value at a Dallas auction.

Heritage Auction Galleries said the bills sold for a total of more than $37,000 -- two to three times higher than expected.

Winning bidders paid about $6,500 each for two of the $20 bills. The money has the handwritten initials of investigators who examined the bills, which were found buried in sand in 1980.

Cooper skyjacked a flight from Portland, Ore., to Seattle, claiming he had a bomb.
Left: An FBI sketch of "D.B. Cooper." Right: Kenneth Christiansen, Northwest purser and former paratrooper; a suspect in the case.

Keep Your Eye on the Ball . . . but duck !!!

"I wanna be a star"

Shown above is a few Peruvian soccer players.

"Camelot" Forever

The New York Philharmonic's recent performances of Lerner & Loewe’s Camelot musical was a smash. Among Broadway, theater, and opera stars, Nathan Gunn played Lancelot along with Gabriel Byrne's Arthur and Marin Mazzie's Guenevere.

Classy and Classic

The Lincoln Center Theater production of Rodgers & Hammerstein's "South Pacific" is one of the hottest tickets in town -- and one of several revivals that have struck a chord with audiences. Shown above is Brazilian Paulo Szot and Kelli O'Hara.

"Mantis Assassin"

Peter Chan's painting "Mantis Assassin" was inspired, the artist says, "by the elegant forms of the praying mantis' exoskeleton. This graceful but deadly dancer was sent on a mission to seduce and assassinate an enemy king. Weapons concealed beneath her striking formal costume are employed to provide a most exciting climax to her performance."

Concept art comes to life

“The Landing” is among Scott Robertson’s series of sketches and renderings found in his book “Lift Off.”

"One thing I like about this piece is that you can still recognize the building forms that came from my original marker sketch," Robertson says. "A rendering like this is really about having the patience and determination to sit for about a week at the computer and pick away at it. The most enjoyable part was the painting of each ship and the addition of the figures. The process of adding the figures was a fun project. At our studio, there is a decent-sized parking lot. One morning I took a ladder outside, climbed up to match the eye level of my rendering with a camera and then asked my studio partner, Neville Page, to walk to different parts of the parking lot and pose in different positions. The photos were added to the rendering and then painted over to change the clothing and characters."

>"Criss Cross"

"Over the past 15 years," Scott Robertson says, "I have designed many production and concept bicycles for a variety of companies and myself. My professional experience with bicycle design began with the designing of advanced composite bike frames for Kestrel, where I had been granted an internship between my fifth and sixth terms of study at Art Center. Since then I have continued to design frames for Kestrel and others.

"During 2001, I had the good fortune of being asked to design a series of advanced concept bikes for the film 'Minority Report.' The bikes were going to be ridden by extras through many of the street scenes. Twelve fully functioning, futuristic bikes were built for the film but only one is seen in the finished film. If you watch really, really closely you might see it through a window for about half a second, being ridden by a newspaper delivery boy. Oh well, the designs were still very fun to do. The bike you see here is not from the film but is an evolution of the types of bikes I had done for that project. All of the bikes I designed were rendered in Photoshop over side-view line sketches I had done. I had always wanted to do a bike rendering that had a bit more dramatic lighting and perspective to it than I usually do for typical industrial design work. What you see here is the result. I used all of the layering abilities and path functions in Photoshop to help me achieve a fairly high level of finish with this piece. I'm sure some of you might be wondering, 'How does that front wheel turn?' The way it works, in theory, is that the front fork is a kind of diamond-shape when viewed from above. This allows for the front wheel to turn left and right from the center hub pivot. The front wheel is pulled left or right via a closed-loop cable system that runs through the frame."

Office of famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal transplanted to Museum of Tolerance in West L.A.

By the time U.S. troops liberated the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria on May 5, 1945, Simon Wiesenthal was so weak from hunger and hard labor that he collapsed at their feet.

Days later, the survivor of Buchenwald and other notorious camps found the strength to embark on what would become a lifelong quest: to bring to justice the major and minor Nazi killers who had exterminated 6 million of his fellow Jews and millions of Gypsies, Poles and other "inferior" peoples.

For nearly half a century, Wiesenthal conducted much of his sleuthing from behind a darkly stained wooden desk in a compact Vienna office. There, in his Jewish Documentation Center, he pored over SS directories, photographs, city phone books and Holocaust survivors' letters in his bid to track offenders literally to the ends of the Earth. Biographers credit him with ferreting out 1,100 war criminals.

Now the famed Nazi hunter's office has been transplanted to the Museum of Tolerance in West Los Angeles, as part of an exhibit examining the Holocaust. Museum officials say the room is just as Wiesenthal left it at his death in 2005 at 96, down to the last pipe, newspaper clipping and sunflower tchotchke.

Stranded scuba divers chase off Komodo dragon

BALI, Indonesia (AP) — Elena Neralairen threw rocks at an aggressive Komodo dragon and scavenged for mussels on a remote Indonesian island where she and fellow divers were stranded for days after being swept away in treacherous currents.

The group — three from Britain and one each from France and Sweden — drifted 20 miles in sharp-infested waters before landing after nightfall on Rinca's palm-fringed beach, their last chance to avoid being swept into the open ocean.

But the next morning, it became clear their ordeal was not yet over. They came face-to-face with a deadly Komodo dragon, which can weigh as much as 365 pounds, and scared the beast away by screaming and pelting it with rocks and sticks.

Interesting and Unusual Photography by Judy Melton

Look closely at this image of an Arizona slot canyon and you can see the silhouette of a bear.
(Photo by Judy Melton of Burbank, California)

Newfoundland's icebergs can be beautiful or terrifying

Iceberg "Large Eye"
Iceberg waterfall
"Iceberg with a bite out of it"
Boat provides visitors a view.