Whitney Houston dead at 48

 Whitney Houston, whose stellar voice made her a superstar but who was long plagued by personal problems including drug abuse, died Saturday. She was 48.

With her incredible vocal range and purity, runway good looks and girl-next-door charm, Whitney Houston was an out-of-the-box superstar when she arrived on the music scene in 1985. Her meteoric rise included record-setting hits, groundbreaking videos and a promising film career.

But by the mid-1990s, rumors of marital woes and drug abuse began to tarnish her image and she took a downward spiral that saw her name emblazoned in sordid tabloid headlines rather than glowing reports of musical success.

Word of the 48-year-old singer's death broke early Saturday evening as the industry gathered in Los Angeles for the official Pre-Grammy Gala hosted by her mentor Clive Davis, chief creative officer of Sony Music Worldwide. The cause and location of her death are unknown.

http://www.usatoday.com/life/people/obit/story/2012-02-11/whitney-houston/53053070/1?csp=34news

Europe cold: staggering

Europe in grip of greatest freeze ever

http://sawdis1.blogspot.com/2012/02/more-than-220-dead-as-big-freeze-grips.html?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

Great pic of aground cruise liner

 

The cruise liner Costa Concordia lies aground in front of the harbour of the Isola del Giglio after hitting underwater rocks on January 13. Italian rescuers were forced to suspend operations on Friday, a week after the Mediterranean tragedy

About to hit southern Africa

Mpumalanga and Limpopo under water ... 150mm overnight

This is the Crocodile River at the entrance to Kruger.

Rare invasion from Mars

Washington - Scientists are confirming a recent and rare invasion from Mars: meteorite chunks from the red planet that fell in Morocco last July.

This is only the fifth time scientists have confirmed chemically Martian meteorites that people witnessed falling. The small rock refugees were seen in a fireball in the sky six months ago, but they were not discovered on the ground in North Africa until the end of December.


http://www.news24.com/SciTech/News/Rare-invasion-from-Mars-20120117?utm_source=news24-am-newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Newsletters

Gardener rapes dachshund

 http://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/Gardener-raped-employers-dog-20120112?utm_source=news24-am-newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Newsletters

Gardener 'raped' employer's dog

Pretoria - A 54-year-old Pretoria gardener has been denied bail after he allegedly raped his employer's Dachshund bitch and then jumped over a wall and ran away.

A prosecutor told a Pretoria court that should the man be given bail, it was possible that he would once again have contact with the dog with which he had had “sexual intercourse”.

This was one of the reasons why prosecutor Lucas Moseki opposed bail for the man - and the application was subsequently turned down.

The gardener, who is accused of bestiality, cannot be identified before he has pleaded, as the charge relates to a sexual offence.

Investigating officer Constable Nomsa Masilela testified that the accused had worked at a house in Lyttelton Manor, Centurion, on November 7 2011.

The domestic worker saw how the gardener picked up the employer’s 7-year-old Dachshund bitch and stroked the dog.

“He walked to the Wendy house with the dog in his arms. The domestic thought he was going to wash the dog,” said Masilela.

But when the man started looking around and walked behind the Wendy house, the domestic worker became suspicious.

“She called her employer. They found the man holding the dog’s back leg and ‘raping’ it,” said Masilela.

The dog’s owner shouted at the gardener, who then dropped the dog and jumped over the wall.

But the dog owner chased after him, caught him and managed to stop a passing police vehicle as well.

The accused claimed at his bail hearing that he knew nothing of the incident.

According to him, his employer and the domestic worker were drunk.

What a nice man of the cloth

http://www.iol.co.za/the-star/reverend-s-kill-whites-tweet-a-shocker-1.1209656

 A reverend used Twitter at the weekend to call for white people in South Africa to be killed.

The man singled out Helen Zille as among those who should be killed.

The Reverend Kemo Immanuel Waters runs a business called the KemoTherapy Institute of Truth and is an active member of Twitter, Facebook and MySpace. He is a DJ and describes himself on his Twitter profile as a preacher, author, poet, father and truth seeker.

From his previous tweets, Waters sounded like an intellectual, spiritual person, who occasionally discussed politics, but not with any controversy.

Then suddenly in the early hours of Saturday morning, this changed.

At 1.33am, the reverend wrote: “The only way to end racism is to kill a material number of whites. @helenzille your indifferent and patronizing stance is a double dare…” 

The tweet caused an uproar, with many responding angrily.

Zille said the tweet was hate speech and that she would be laying charges against Waters.

Captain Crossbat throws a tantrum

Hillbrow last night

http://twitpic.com/81makb

Hell of a way to see in the New Year

Woman in Nottingham Road arrives home, and the inclement weather causes an oak tree to crash onto her car.

http://bit.ly/rXfk3w

Great view of a lunar crater

http://www.universetoday.com/92188/lro-lets-you-stand-on-the-rim-of-aristarchus-crater/

New island created overnight

http://www.universetoday.com/92163/as-seen-from-space-volcanic-eruption-creates-new-island-in-the-red-sea/

The world's first 5MB hard drive

Thanks to my wife Karen for this.

‘In September 1956 IBM launched the 305 RAMAC, the first ‘SUPER’ computer with a hard disk drive (HDD). The HDD weighed over a ton and stored 5 MB of data.’

http://www.retronaut.co/2011/12/5mb-hard-disk-drive-1956/

Suspected tornado in Potch

http://saweatherobserver.blogspot.com/search/label/Tornadoes

2 great comet photos

The first photo is of Comet Lovejoy from Canberra, the secondfrom the Space Station.

To put these pictures into perspective, there are more than one trillion comets aligned with our solar system alone, orbiting outside Pluto at a mere 200kph. Eventually they all dissipate.

Awesome waterfall pic: Yosemite, California

Thanks to Karen for drawing this to my attention.


http://t.co/Nr4HxBa2

Two black holes most massive ever found

Artist's rendition of the giant black holes.

(Thanks to David Blood for bringing this to my attention.)

http://lightyears.blogs.cnn.com/2011/12/05/two-black-holes-most-massive-ever-found-astronomers-say/?on.cnn=1

Black holes: They're the most destructive monsters in the universe. We already knew they can be powerfully massive. Now scientists say they've found the most massive ones yet, as reported in the journal Nature.

How big?

The mass of each is about 10 billion times the mass of our sun. The previous black hole record holder, first measured in 1977, has a mass of about 6 billion suns.

And for each black hole, the "event horizon" – basically areas from which nothing can escape their gravity – is about five times the distance between our sun and Pluto.

How hot it has been