The butler did it.

News today that the asteroid impact 65 million years ago do not immediately snuff out the dinosaurs. The Daily Mail is reporting that researchers from Princeton University have come up with evidence that suggests the Chicxulub crater in Mexico is about 300, 00 years older than the time lines generally agreed to be gospel about when the dinosaurs winked out. This is the spot the asteroid actually hit.

The resulting explosive gases and dust shrouded the earth and the rest well, is real ancient history. But, not so according to research head Professor Gerta Keller. Seems those nasty Indian volcanoes went off about the same time. I'm talking about a coincidal series of huge eruptions at an area in India called the Deccan TrapInstead she found that bore holes showed clearly a very slow gradual layer of sediment, taking round about 300,000 years to develop, just above the time of the impact. In fact the layers are about as natural and ordinary as can be. So there.

I thought it was the booze all along that killed them off.

The old folks will still have their Buicks.

For those of you who have spent the day nailed to a board in the basement may not have heard that GM is killing the Pontiac and keeping the Buick. Those of you who haven't been in a cone of silence will note with some sadness the passing of a sometimes cool automaker. I mean cars like the GTO, Firebird and the Bonneville, all classy.

Started in 1926, Pontiac didn't set anything on fire until the addition of designer John Zachary DeLorean (yes, the Back to the Future car guy) in 1959. Delorean was responsible for a number of innovative ideas including the "ropeshaft" drive shaft introduced in the 1960 Pontiac Tempest. The base engine for this car, a spunky 4 cylinder, was literally half of the current Pontiac 389 cubic inch V8. Tests proved that half the V8 ran just fine so tooling costs were cut since half the parts were already in production.

I for one will miss the Pontiac, but am slightly pleased that Buicks are still easy to spot on the highway.

That's gotta hurt.

Starting up a new department tonight. In poking around the news and archives I see so much amazingly messed up stuff that it's too good to pass up. I'm not talking about the typical shock Internet crap a la Jackass stuff. I'm talking "it really happened." And if it has some stupid historical connection, I'm there.

So, today's 1st gem is from Japan. Though these events occurred just a few months ago, it does connect with a short couple of posts I did about submarines colliding.

The Japan Times reported that on January 12th of this year a surfacing submarine collided with a Japanese fishing vessel. This tiny little story is telling in that the fishing vessel had aboard at this time a Maritime Self Defence Force officer charged with preventing submarine / fishing boat collisions. He was on the lookout for a sub when it happened.

And from the other side of the globe now, news of another sub/boat crack up. The Straight of Hormuz is the spot, the date, last Friday night. An American submarine, the USS Hartford and a surface vessel, the USS New Orleans, ran into each other around 1am.

Seems the collision was a vertical one, that is to say, the Hartford was under the New Orleans. No details if someone official was posted on the New Orleans to spot for submarines.