Feeling more happy than usual this particular Friday? You should be, according to a scholar in seasonal disorders at a British university.
Cliff Arnall has analysed such factors as outdoor activities, nature, social interaction, childhood memories, temperature and holidays -- data gathered over a period of 15 years in interviews with 3,000 people around the world.
His conclusion: June 23 is the happiest day of the year.
"People across borders experience happiness when they meet with friends and family and establish close social relationships," the University of Cardiff academic told AFP. "We need some close emotional ties."
He used what he considers a "simple equation" to reach his conclusion -- O + (N x S) + Cpm/T + He.
O stands for outdoor activities, N for nature, S for social interaction, Cpm for childhood summers and positive memories, T for temperature and He for holidays and looking forward to time off.
Arnall has already figured out the saddest day of the year. It was January 23 -- a Monday. "Surprise, surprise", he quipped.
A couple times a month, deep in Silicon Valley, a group of software engineers meets for a Gentlemen's Fight Club. Scroll through the pictures to see and read the story of the most recent gathering.
A Florida man drowned after jumping onto an inflatable raft and paddling out to the middle of a lake to try to retrieve a stalled, radio-controlled toy boat, police said Tuesday.
Another toy boat punctured the raft, causing it to deflate rapidly, and the 31-year-old victim could not swim, Miami-Dade Police said.
The accident occurred Monday evening at a park northwest of Miami where the victim and several friends were racing the remote-controlled boats.
"I think it was all purely accidental. It's a fluke," said Detective Joanne Duncan.
Study Hard and You, Too, Can Deliver Pizza
People might say I'm crazy to waste my education, but I have what most of them don't: a job I love.
By Kathy Kallenbach Clark
Newsweek
May 22, 2006 issue - I'm a 43-year-old mother of three young kids with a Master of Science degree. I also deliver pizzas for a living. I started doing it after staying home with my children for four years. Caring for your kids all day is a fantastic opportunity for many women, but it wasn't right for me. I began suffering from depression and decided to get a job so I'd have more of my own identity. Now I work nights when my husband is home so we don't have to depend on child care.
After I learned the basics of pizza delivery—like getting the orders together and not getting lost—I began to fine-tune my new "career." Being competitive and organized by nature, I studied the tipping patterns and demographics of the town.
Our community had a small, expensive liberal-arts college full of students who ordered lots of pizzas. Most of the kids were friendly and polite. On Friday and Saturday nights, some of the dorms had huge parties. Though the stairs were sticky from beer and the music was so loud they couldn't hear me knock on the door, the crowds of happy students shouting, "Pizza! Pizza!" always let me through.
A few of the quieter dorms were full of more studious students who seemed to look down on me, perhaps because they were on their way to more professional employment. I always felt like telling them that they should stay in school and get their master's degrees, and maybe one day they would have the wonderful experience of delivering pizzas.
The first few days of each month, one of us drivers would take our turn covering the public-housing developments. These customers did not always tip well, but I always liked seeing the children and adults sitting outside and enjoying the evenings when the weather was nice. The higher-income neighborhoods were much quieter, and I rarely saw neighbors talking to each other.
The delivery area was quite large, but in a country town like that one you could drive 10 or 15 miles and hit only one stoplight, so a quick driver could cover more than 100 miles and 20 deliveries a night. I learned to love the solitude, listening to music, looking up at the stars and thinking about life.
A year ago my husband switched jobs and we moved to the suburb of a large city. I planned to get a job that would put my degree to use, but within two weeks of settling in I found myself yearning to drive again. I went to work with a pizza franchise and once again had to learn how to pack orders and not get lost. Within a month I learned the lay of the land, which included eight-lane highways and stoplights every mile. Deliveries take far more time, but some things never change. The college routine continues, and public-assistance checks bring a boost of business at the beginning of the month.
I also deliver to multimillion-dollar homes now, but the amount I make in tips has stayed the same. As I drive up to these beautiful houses, it's easy to fantasize about a generous tip. The person who answers the door invariably looks young and, like the members of my own family, highly educated. All I usually get is a brief "Thank you" and a dollar or two. (Why do people tip a waiter 20 percent to bring them their food from a kitchen that's 15 feet away but barely tip someone who drives 10 miles to do it?)
Not everyone is generous, but most of the people I meet are honest and will tell me if I give them a $5 bill in change when I should have given them a dollar. Still, there are some who like to try to put one over on me. I wonder how those people feel about tak-ing my money. Do they think the company will make up for it? The truth is that if I come up short at the end of the night, I pay for it out of my pocket.
I keep my résumé up to date and look for jobs that require my degree, but I haven't found anything that interests me. I feel bad that my daughter does not ask me to speak at her school on career day, but there is something about delivering pizzas that I find very fulfilling. I love watching the moon change nightly and working with fun, happy people. This job has made me very nonjudgmental about what people choose to do for a living.
You can now order a pizza on the Internet, but it is still a real person who has to deliver it. If you're lucky, you'll get someone like me, who loves her job. Please tip accordingly.
CLARK lives in Newark, Dela.
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A 17-year-old boy who police said asked a friend to hit him with a car "for fun" was still hospitalized Tuesday with a broken leg.
Michael Morris, a junior at Chesterton High School, was in fair condition at Porter hospital, spokeswoman Robin Carlascio said.
His friend, Stephen D. Domonkos, 18, told police that Morris on Saturday night asked him to hit him with his car, something they had done before. He told police that Morris was "an adrenaline junkie."
Domonkos was driving about 25 mph when the car hit Morris, shattering the windshield, in the parking lot of a Chesterton restaurant where Domonkos works.
Domonkos was charged with felony criminal recklessness. If convicted, he could face six months to three years in jail.
"I won't do this no more," Morris of Chesterton told The Times of Munster.
Believing they had a botched burglary on their hands, police in Hayward, California, called to a house instead found a naked man wedged in its chimney, a police officer said Monday.
"He didn't have a stitch on," Lt. Gary Branson of the Hayward Police Department said, referring to Michael Urbano.
The 23-year-old man came home early Saturday morning and, finding himself locked out and without his keys, tried to enter the single-story house through its chimney.
"He told us he took off his clothes because as he was going down the chimney the clothes would rub up against it and slow him down," Branson said. "If it was skin on cement he felt he would go down easier."
Urbano's effort ended disastrously when a cable-television wire he used to lower himself snapped. He fell and was wedged in a section of the chimney tapering into the home's fireplace.
For the next four hours he cried out for help. A neighbor called police and fire fighters, who dislodged Urbano, Branson said. Officers booked Urbano for being under the influence of drugs, he added.
A sex-change chicken which started life as an egg-laying hen has turned into a crowing cockerel.
The pet, called Freaky, spent eight months laying dozens of eggs until she crowed like a cock bird one morning.
Over the next few weeks, she sprouted a scarlet comb, grew red flaps called wattles under her chin and tufty tail feathers - all attributes of cockerels.
Owner Jo Richards, of Saltford, near Bristol, said: "I've kept chickens for 10 years but I've never heard of such a thing."
Animal experts said Freaky's sexchangewas a one-in-10,000 rarity. It happens when a damaged ovary causes the hen's testosterone levels to soar, turning the remaining ovary into a testicle.
Freaky, a silver-laced Wyandotte hen, now crows every sunrise, aggressively attacks other males and even tries to mate with his old female friends.
Victoria Roberts, of the Poultry Club of Great Britain, said: "This is very, very rare. I've been keeping poultry for 35 years and I've seen it only once."
A boring phone conversation prompted an emergency alert when a German man nodded off while talking to his girlfriend, authorities said.
The 42-year-old man in the southern city of Nuremberg was on the phone to his partner Sunday when he fell into a doze.
The woman became alarmed when he stopped speaking and called him back several times, only to get a busy signal. Then she called the police.
Fearing the worst, the emergency services dispatched a police car to the man's house, followed by the fire brigade and an ambulance.
"When the whole crew pulled up in full force, sirens blaring, the man opened the door in a daze," a police spokesman said.
The man explained the silence at his end of the line to officers at the scene: a cat-nap during a lull in the conversation.
The Easter Bunny has been fired — for losing his head. Arthur J. McClure, 22, who had been hired to play the Easter Bunny at a local mall has been accused of removing the head of the costume and hitting a customer, authorities said.
McClure punched Erin Johansson when she got upset that the photo exhibit was closing 10 minutes early Saturday night, police reports said. The incident was witnessed by dozens of people at the Edison Mall, including 15 children.
McClure said he never punched Johansson. He claims he was trying to stop a fight between his wife — exhibit manager Crystal Frechette — and Johansson.
He said he took the bunny's head off because he had been wearing it for nine hours and was hot.
"My shirt was soaked with sweat," McClure said. "I almost threw up."
Mall management issued an apology to parents and children. Golden, Colo.-based Noerr Programs Corp., which contracted with the mall to run the photo set, fired McClure and Frechette on Monday. They also have been charged with battery and disturbing the peace.
Lance Nesta did what many people do when receiving a fruitcake — he set it aside, only to rediscover it more than 40 years later in his mother's attic. Nesta couldn't resist taking a peek at the cake, still in its original tin and wrapped in paper.
"I was amazed that it hadn't changed at all," he said.
Nesta's two aunts sent him the fruitcake in November 1962 while he was stationed in Alaska with the Army.
"I opened it up and didn't know what to do with it," Nesta said. "I sure wasn't going to eat it, and I liked my fellow soldiers too much to share it with them."
As best he can remember, he packed the cake with the rest of his belongings and shipped it home to Waukesha when he left the military a few years later. He recently rediscovered the boxed fruitcake in the attic of his mother's home in Waukesha.
His mom had given him advance warning of the fruitcake back in 1962.
"She knew I hated the damn things, but she said she didn't have the heart to tell my aunts, who had already mailed it," he said.
The cake arrived wrapped in brown paper with a red "fragile, handle with care" sticker on it. The cake itself was contained in a round blue tin printed with the words "Old Fashioned Fruitcake."
"Now it's just old," Nesta said.
While looking at the cake's container this week, he noticed the listed ingredients included rum and brandy.
"If I had known back then that it had rum and brandy in it, I would have eaten it," he said.
Follow the rabbit tracks. BAM! The tracks suddenly end where the wing prints of an owl start. This picture was taken by a friend of a friend who teaches in Bethel,Alaska. Photo by Susan Barstow.
TOKYO (Reuters) - A Japanese man wept for joy this week when he recovered 5 million yen ($42,210) in cash his wife had mistakenly thrown out with the household rubbish.
The 35-year-old man had withdrawn the money from a bank account but, fearing it would be stolen, he hid it inside a refuse bag which he placed in a rubbish bin, Japanese media said.
His wife unknowingly threw out the bag, which was found last month at a refuse collection point outside an apartment building in Saitama, north of Tokyo.
Local police returned the money after the man was able to give details of the exact amount and where he had withdrawn it.
Many Japanese keep large quantities of money hidden in their homes and cash is often used for business transactions.
1. Software Engineer
Why it's great Software engineers are needed in virtually every part of the economy, making this one of the fastest-growing job titles in the U.S. Even so, it's not for everybody.
Designing, developing and testing computer programs requires some pretty advanced math skills and creative problem-solving ability. If you've got them, though, you can work and live where you want: Telecommuting is quickly becoming widespread.
The profession skews young -- the up-all-night-coding thing gets tired -- but consulting and management positions aren't hard to come by once you're experienced.
What's cool Cutting-edge projects, like designing a new video game or tweaking that military laser. Extra cash from freelance gigs. Plus, nothing says cool like great prospects.
What's not Jobs at the biggest companies tend to be less creative (think Neo, pre-Matrix). Outsourcing is a worry. Eyestrain and back, hand and wrist problems are common.
Top-paying job Release engineers, who are responsible for the final version of any software product, earn six figures.
Education Bachelor's degree, but moving up the ladder often requires a master's.
BUFFALO, N.Y. - A teenage girl acknowledged making about 1,000 fake 911 calls from her cell phone, laughing, taunting and saying, "You can't catch me," police said Monday.
Police said some of the calls made this month lasted several minutes, and one lasted an hour.
The girl was charged over the weekend with two counts of misdemeanor falsely reporting an incident for allegedly making six fake 911 calls from a local church phone Saturday.
"She didn't give us a reason for doing this," Chief of Detectives Dennis Richards said. "She was very disrespectful, and she said that she was going to keep calling 911."
The girl's name was not released because she is a minor.
The case follows the arrest earlier this year of Juan Merced, who along with his wife and oldest son was accused of making nearly 1,000 fake 911 calls from his Buffalo home.
Police said this new case may be a copycat one.
ELKO, Nev. - A man accused of burglarizing a laundromat in Elko figured he made a clean escape over the weekend when he took off with the store's six video surveillance cameras.
But it turns out he left some rather compelling evidence behind — the video machine and videotape that recorded his face each time he stood in front of the cameras at the Southside Laundry.
Elko police said they came away with several close-ups of the suspect, Robert Lynn White, 52, Elko.
And even if the portraits were a little fuzzy, police said they would have been able to easily identify him because he was wearing cowboy chaps and a trench coat, the usual attire he wears around town.
Police are still working to recover the missing cameras but in the meantime they have arrested White on suspicion of grand larceny. The store is owned by Elko County Commissioner John Ellison.
