Free Republic

Does anyone recognize this? It's a weighted clamp, used by a vendor at the farmers market to hold down his tent from blowing away. He said he got it from a photographers' supply -- that it's something photographers use to keep their equipment steady in outdoor shooting conditions. I'm trying to buy something like this, but I can't look for it until I know what it's called. Thanks....

Ancient mega-catastrophe paved way for the dinosaurs, spawned Australian continent. Planetary scientists have found evidence of a meteor impact much larger and earlier than the one that killed the dinosaurs -- an impact that they believe caused the biggest mass extinction in Earth's history.The 300-mile-wide crater lies hidden more than a mile beneath the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. And the gravity measurements that reveal its existence suggest that it could date back about 250 million years -- the time of the Permian-Triassic extinction, when almost all animal life on Earth died out.Its size and location -- in the Wilkes Land...