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A message in a bottle delivered to a Confederate general during the American Civil War has been deciphered, 147 years after it was written. In the encrypted message, a commander tells Gen John Pemberton that no reinforcements are available to help him defend Vicksburg, Mississippi. "You can expect no help from this side of the river," says the message, which was deciphered by codebreakers. The text is dated 4 July 1863 - the day Vicksburg fell to Union forces.

A 29-year-old St. Paul woman has been charged with two counts of assault with a dangerous weapon: a bottle of Hot Damn cinnamon schnapps. According to a criminal complaint filed Friday in Ramsey County District Court, Shaunna Rae Maldacker smashed the liquor bottle over her boyfriend's head and then cut him on the arms with the broken bottle early Thursday. Details of the incident come from the criminal complaint: The boyfriend told police that the two were arguing at a residence in the 1200 block of West Seventh Street in St. Paul. The boyfriend said that when Maldacker tried to...

SAN FRANCISCO, - A group of California fishermen who sent a message in a bottle two years ago said they were delighted when someone found the bottle and even sent a reply. The fishermen, from the San Francisco and Monterey Bay areas, said they tossed the bottle into the water just south of San Diego in August 2007 with a message about Bob Dubcich, a friend of theirs who died from a rare form of cancer, KSBW-TV, Salinas, Calif., reported Monday. The men said they enclosed $20 with the note to increase the chances of someone coming forward after finding...

BOSTON (AP) — A woman on a trans-Atlantic flight diverted to Boston for security concerns passed several notes to crew members, urinated on the cabin floor and made comments the crew believed were references to al-Qaida and the Sept. 11 attacks, according to an affidavit filed Thursday. Catherine C. Mayo, 59, of Braintree, Vt., was to appear in federal court later Thursday on a charge of interfering with a flight crew after disrupting United 923 as it flew from London to Washington, D.C., on Wednesday. The flight, with 182 passengers and 12 crew members, landed safely with the escort of...

SCHENECTADY — This plot may rival the real murder mystery. On Sunday, several plastic bottles of an azure colored liquid with the inscriptions, "Winter of Frozen Dreams" were discovered outside the Times Union and at Proctors where a movie by the same title is scheduled to debut next month. Then Monday, county hazardous material crews took samples from five, 2-liter bottles left in a plastic bin in the driveway of the Daily Gazette by an older woman clad in a kerchief, police said.

WHEN a workman started knocking down part of a chimney in a museum he found a letter in a beer bottle that had lain hidden for 102 years. Stonemason Joe Kipling discovered the bottle as he worked on a major alteration project at the Bowes Museum, in Barnard Castle. Museum officials were delighted yesterday when they read the letter, which had been handwritten in 1906 by Owen Stanley Scott, who was the curator and secretary of the museum at the time. It states that the flue was one of a number being blocked up in April 1906 when stoves used...

Evan Buffington knew what he had found as soon as he spotted it in the sand. The bottle was imbedded in a small island no more than 48 square miles called Middle Caicos, part of the British West Indies. Buffington found it while vacationing with his family in late August, on a hike with the men of the family. Buffington, a resident of Makanda, Ill., dug out the bottle and brushed off the sand. It was a clear glass Tab cola bottle, with a cork inside and an aluminum screw top to keep it sealed. Some moisture had seeped in,...

Video of a guy rigging 8500 bottle rockets to set off at (nearly) the same time.

Write a message, put it in a bottle, toss it in the ocean, and someone will eventually get it. They can add to it, or toss it in the trash. Fun timewaster!

Great movie. Maybe the best you'll see on Google.

It’s no wonder that the American people are frustrated with the Republican Congress. Americans deserve progress, but instead are bombarded with politics driven by fear and division. They deserve action on the challenges we face as a nation - an endless and costly war in Iraq, skyrocketing gas prices and soaring health-care costs. Rather than dealing with real priorities, the Republican leadership is focused on writing discrimination into the Constitution. Just like the circus surrounding the Senate’s effort to intrude into the Terry Schiavo case, today the Senate will begin debate on the Federal Marriage Amendment - a wholly inappropriate...

[ . . . ] The Romans were the first to use wine as a finely calibrated social yardstick - and thus inaugurated centuries of wine snobbery . . . Pliny the Younger, writing in the late first century A.D., described a dinner at which the host and his friends were served fine wine, second-rate wine was served to other guests, and third-rate wine was served to former slaves. [ . . . ] Just how seriously the Romans took the business of wine classification can be seen from the story of Marcus Antonius, a Roman politician who in 87...

Contact: Steve Bradt steve_bradt@harvard.edu 617-496-8070 Harvard University Ancient humans brought bottle gourds to the Americas from AsiaPlants widely used as containers arrived, already domesticated, some 10,000 years ago CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Dec. 13, 2005 -- Thick-skinned bottle gourds widely used as containers by prehistoric peoples were likely brought to the Americas some 10,000 years ago by individuals who arrived from Asia, according to a new genetic comparison of modern bottle gourds with gourds found at archaeological sites in the Western Hemisphere. The finding solves a longstanding archaeological enigma by explaining how a domesticated variant of a species native to Africa ended...

LOS ANGELES - Leonardo DiCaprio was hit with a bottle while attending a Hollywood party given by Paris Hilton's ex-boyfriend and needed about a dozen stitches to close a wound near his ear, People Magazine reported on its Web site. The magazine said DiCaprio was at a party at about 4 a.m. Friday at the home of Rick Salomon when a woman struck him with what appeared to be a beer bottle. No ambulance was called but friends took the actor to a hospital where he received about a dozen stitches, People said. Los Angeles Police Officer Jason Lee, a...

Hey Freepers -- let's make Thursday, March 24th "Overnight Terri Schiavo a Bottle of Water Day". Let's see how many thousands of bottles of water we can get shipped to Terri Schiavo. UPS, FedEx, USPS, DHL, whatever. Let's do overnight shipping and pack in as much water as you can afford to send! Call all your local and national radio shows and get them involved. I believe the address is: Terri Schiavo Woodside Hospice 6774 102nd Ave Pinellas Park, FL 33782-2909 If someone has a better address, please post it below.

Land around a mysterious cavern underneath Blackheath could soon be under investigation. Parkman's, the surveyors who investigated a six-foot-wide crater that appeared in the A2 at Blackheath Hill last April has said further checks on land stability in the area are needed. Decisions on their report were to be made by Greenwich council last night. But the council, which would apply for a grant from English Partnerships to cover the costs of the investigation, is not yet sure how much it will cost. The collapse of the A2 into chalk pits after subsoil washed away triggered traffic chaos, hundreds of...

Beijing - Beer bottles that exploded in the hot summer weather were one of the biggest health risks Chinese consumers faced last year, Xinhua news agency reported on Sunday. Complaints about food safety rose by nearly 25 percent in 2003 as newly wealthy Chinese consumers looked for quality and spoke out if they were disappointed, Xinhua quoted a leading consumer group as saying. "Personal injury, foreign matter in food, outdated or undated food and children's food safety were the chief (causes of) complaint," said Wang Qianhu, director of the China Consumers' Association's complaint and law department. "...Beer bottle explosions were...

A chilling reminder of our superstitious past has been unearthed from a rural farmhouse. The "witch bottle" was discovered buried in old foundations in the Lincolnshire village of Navenby. Containing bent pins, human hair and perhaps urine, the bottles were supposed to protect a household against evil spells. Dated to about 1830, it is evidence the fear of dark forces persisted far longer than previously thought. Discovered by accident during building work, the artefact initially sat unrecognised in a cupboard. Jo Butler, the house's owner, described what they found. She said: "The builder was breaking up foundations with a pick...

London - A sheepdog roaming away from his owner's farm retrieved a bottle with a message from an ailing homeless man and took it home to his master, allowing Scottish emergency workers to arrive in time to save the man who had not eaten or had any water for days. The Guardian newspaper reported on Friday that Ben the border collie crossed three fields to a deserted farmhouse in the Falkirk area to find the plastic bottle on which Robert Sinclair had scribbled a hasty note. Sinclair, 55, who has lived rough in the area for 27 years, had not...

OSLO, Norway (AP) -- More than 26 years after her father died at sea, a Norwegian woman was shocked to receive a message from him in a bottle. The crinkled note, with her father's handwriting in red marker pen, aroused "powerful feelings" in her, Guri Abelsen said Wednesday. Abelsen said her father, Ola Abelsen, had told her he wrote a message in a bottle which he had thrown into the sea from his fishing boat, Utvik Senior, in February 1977. Later that month, the boat sank with Abelsen and eight other men on board, after disappearing off the Norwegian coast....

World War II message washes up A bottle containing a message from a refugee fleeing the Nazis during World War II has been found on a remote Swedish beach. The note, dated to 1943 and scrawled on now yellowed paper, was written in English and asked if the war was over. It was signed by a woman called Maja Westerman from the then Nazi-occupied Baltic state of Estonia, who had fled to Gotska Sandoen, a Swedish island 150 kilometres (92 miles) from where the bottle was found. Thorsten Schwarz, the Swiss tourist who found the bottle, said he hoped to...

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. (July 11) - Almost five years to the day that Roger Clay died in a motorcycle accident, his parents got one last message from him - a sun-scorched note he had stuffed in a bottle as a child and set adrift in 1984. A man found the bottle in a St. Petersburg canal on the Fourth of July and returned it this week to Clay's mother. ``I dread this time of year every year. It's the worst,'' Lisa Ferguson told the St. Petersburg Times for Thursday's editions. ``But now I have something wonderful to think about.'' Clay...

SYDNEY restaurants and bars are charging customers up to $8 for a bottle of water, making profits of 400 per cent on wholesale prices. The cost of bottled water has sky-rocketed as pubs, clubs and restaurants resist giving their customers tap water. Establishments across Sydney are charging similar prices. For example, a 750ml bottle of water at Hoyts cinema at Fox Studios in Moore Park costs $4.10. The Cosmopolitan Terrace Cafe in Double Bay charged $4.50 for a 330ml bottle. Homebar in Darling Harbour charged $5 for a 500ml bottle, and patrons of the Harbour Kitchen Bar in The Rocks...

For sale, for dreamers: A mystery in a bottle Wed Jan 15, 8:07 AM ET Maria Puente USA TODAY After the hurricane blew through, Marty DeWelt staggered from the bathroom where she had huddled through the night and went outside to survey the damage along her lakeside property near Williamsburg, Va. That's when she found the glass bottle. It was green and it looked old, with a crude tin cap. And it had a message rolled up inside. Peering in, she thought the paper looked like parchment covered with wax. She could make out the letters ''W,'' ''I,'' ''H'' and...

Caribbean message-in-a-bottle ends up ten miles from UK home A Kent schoolboy dropped a message in a bottle in the Caribbean only for it to wash up ten miles from his home. Thirteen-year-old Alexi Hall was on a two-year family voyage more than 4,500 miles from Britain when he dropped the rum bottle with a note inside. It gave contact details of a relative in English and French. A year after he arrived home, Alexi got a call to say it had been found by a woman at Lydd on the Kent coast. Alexi's mother Helen, from Saltwood, near Folkestone,...