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CHICAGO (WBBM) -- Holiday travel for Amtrak started a couple of days ago and runs through next Tuesday. Amtrak travel has seen more interest with a 20 percent increase in Illinois ridership since 2007.  Travel by rail is expected to continue that trend.  Amtrak spokesman Marc Magliari says holiday travel by rail stretches several days longer than at the airports, with today being busiest day for passengers.  He expects 125,000 passengers will board an Amgrak train before Thanksgiving Day, a 70 percent increase in normal ridership for midweek. Amtrak is prepared, scheduling extra trains and longer train to accommodate more...

Americans searching for cheaper Thanksgiving tripsThe Miles family is changing it up this year in the annual American race to make it to the table for Thanksgiving dinner. Instead of booking plane tickets, they opted to take the 1,100-mile trip by train. Airline tickets seemed too pricey, so they paid $800 for the five of them to travel roundtrip by train from their Syracuse, N.Y., home to Omaha, Neb. to see family. Airfare would have totaled more than $2,500, the family said. "Economic considerations topped the list for us," Maureen Miles, 44, a doctor's office receptionist, said sitting with her...

Alittle late in making those Thanksgiving flight plans? Wondering how you could possibly afford your ticket -- that is, without putting a kidney up for sale on Craigslist? Good news! You can get a free flight home on Southwest plus a $300 travel voucher. Just do what I plan to -- get on a Southwest flight in the next few days, and when it's taking off, shout over and over, "Go, plane, go!" and "I want Daddy! I want Daddy!" Pamela Root got the free flight and the voucher, plus an apology from Southwest, after her 2-year-old kept screaming those...

Sorry about not putting up an image last week -- circumstances intervened. But I had already come up with this idea, and I think it's appropriate for a holiday (at least in the U.S.) week where there are a lot of travelers. Also, this is a user participation thread. I invite readers to find other examples and post them here. If you've never done that before, if you find an image, you can (in Windows) click on it and get an option to "Copy Image Location". If you do that, then in a response you use HTML code: img src="image...

...Maine has a reputation of pulling archaeology out of Sunday supplement romances into science. The University of Maine excavation at Passadumkeag, along with several smaller digs scattered through the state, resulted in a detailed picture of Red Paint Man, inhabiting Maine about 1,000 B.C. His tools, utensils, and other Old Stone Age handicraft along with his usage of red ochre strongly suggest that this proto-Indian still practised Cro-Magnon culture. Another excavation at Pemaquid Point awoke a successful settlement from its long sleep under several feet of soil. Radiocarbon dating set it as early as 1540 A.D., and the colony persisted...

In 2004, the European Space Agency released a design study called “Human Missions to Mars: Overall Architecture Assessment”. This study was undertaken after a decade of work, notably by David Baker, Jim French, and Robert Zubrin, which established that local propellant production using the Martian atmosphere would be a key technology for practical human access to the Red Planet.

Artist Jens Werner Andersen from Norway painted his house in Burberry check pattern. He said he woke up one day and thought it would be a fun idea. The 33-year-old decided to turn his home, a former public lavatory building in Larvik, Norway, into a "gathering place for happy people". We wonder if his neighbours were quite so happy

A marvelous painting of a gourmand at his table hangs in the Musée Carnavalet in Paris — a portly, pink-faced figure happily gorging on a regal casserole, with a bottle of wine at one elbow and a luscious-looking soufflé at the other. It is traditionally believed to be a portrait of Alexandre-Balthazar-Laurent Grimod de la Reynière, an aristocrat notorious in Napoleonic France for gratifying his palate with the same abandon as his contemporary the Marquis de Sade showed in indulging carnal desires. Whether or not the painting is actually Grimod’s likeness, it captures the eccentric, omnivorous spirit that made him...

For two millennia the Great Drain has carried the mineral-rich waters of Britain's only hot spring from the Roman Bath in Bath to the nearby River Avon. The drain runs for nearly half a mile under the city but although parts of it are large enough for a man to walk through, it has never been fully explored. Archaeologists will have their first opportunity to get inside the previously inaccessible sections of the Great Drain this month when engineers open it up for repairs. A stretch of drain built long after the Romans is causing the difficulties. The extension was...

After the discovery of the building that perhaps supported Nero's rotating dining room on the Palatine, excavations for Line C of Rome's subway brought to light a building that, according to the first hypotheses made by archaeologists, is thought to be Hadrian's Academy, built in 133 A.D. to host poets, rectors, philosophers, men of letters, scientists and magistrates. Hadrian, or Publius Aelius Hadrianus, ruled from 117-138 AD. He was an avid philosopher who was commonly referred to as one of the "five good emperors." Hadrian's Wall, in Northern England was built after a great war in what was then called...

Scotland already has more identified Roman camps than any other European country -- reflecting Rome's repeated attempts to stamp its rule on the troublesome north. Now the number is set to increase. The first comprehensive survey of Roman remains for 30 years will boost the total of officially recognised sites and give them greater legal protection, officials said yesterday. Traces of at least 225 Roman military camps dot the Scottish countryside from the Borders to Aberdeenshire... They can be spotted today mostly from the air, where the distinctive bank and ditch defences thrown up by the legionaries still mark the...

An investigation into temples built by Greek colonists in Sicily has found strong evidence that they were aligned to the East. The findings, by Alun Salt, of the University of Leicester, suggest that Ancient Greek religion may have included ritual elements inspired by astronomy, as well as illuminating the national culture of settlers who founded communities beyond the mainland. The study could settle a long-running dispute among archaeologists and classicists about temple orientation. Although it has long been known that most of these shrines face east, some academics have questioned whether this alignment reflected a deliberate plan. Critics of astronomical...

A team of Bulgarian archaeologists led by Veselin Ignatov formally presented Tuesday their finds from the tomb of an aristocrat from Ancient Thrace near the southern town of Nova Zagora. In October and November 2009, Ignatov's team found a burial tomb of dated back to the end of 1st century and beginning of 2nd century AD, located outside of the village of Karanovo, in southern Bulgaria. The finds at the lavish Thracian tomb include gold rings, silver cups and vessels coated with gold and clay vessels. Those include two silver cups with images of love god Eros, and a number...

RESCUE: Snowmachiners come to aid of passengers, including infant twins. Without a word, with the plane at 4,500 feet, pilot Bradley Amos tapped something on the instrument panel. Seven passengers -- including twin 8-month-old girls -- were in the cabin. Soon came a loud popping sound. The plane's single propeller suddenly stopped turning and the smell of engine smoke filtered past the seats. The Cessna 207 glided without power above the tundra in Southwest Alaska. That was the low point of the Wednesday night flight. Here's the highlight: Within what felt like two minutes, the plane was on the ground....

Dutch researcher Eva Kaptijn succeeded in discovering -- based on 100,000 finds -- that the Zerqa Valley in Jordan had been successively inhabited and irrigated for more than 13,000 years. But it was not just communities that built irrigation systems: the irrigation systems also built communities... she has been applying an intensive field exploration technique: 15 metres apart, the researchers would walk forward for 50 metres. On the outward leg, they'd pick up all the earthenware and, on the way back, all of the other material. This resulted in more than 100,000 finds, varying from about 13,000 years to just...

The animals, which included mammoths, elephant-sized mastodons and beavers the size of black bears, were probably picked off by more inept hunters who only much later developed specialised weapons when their prize catches became scarce. "Some people thought humans arrived and decimated the populations of these animals in a few hundred years, but what we've found is not consistent with that rapid 'blitzkrieg' overkill of large animals," said Jacquelyn Gill, a PhD student at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who led the research team... Gill's team rules this out by putting a more accurate date on the decline and fall...

The gardens were built when the Abbey of Cernes was transformed into a country mansion in the mid-16th century after the Dissolution of the Monasteries. One resident who may have been responsible for the gardens was Denzil Holles, a characterful MP who fought for the Parliamentarians but was a Royalist at heart and who occupied the house from 1642-66. The Rev John Hutchins, a local historian writing in 1774, claimed that he was told that the giant was "a modern thing" cut by Lord Holles. The National Trust, which owns the field where the giant is carved, suggests that the...

According to a new study of clay pots and ceramic tablets discovered almost 70 years ago in Harappa, now in Pakistan, the people of the Indus Valley had a detailed system of commodity value, weights and measures. Dr Bryan Wells, a researcher based at India's Institute of Mathematical Sciences, told The Daily Telegraph he had begun work on his thesis ten years ago when he first saw photographs of the clay pots with markings which appeared to be in proportion to their relative size. But he was not able to test his thesis until he visited New Delhi earlier this...

Jews had long suspected that the entrance to the real burial chamber must be here, and because of that they placed their prayer slips of paper in wall cracks on the exterior of the building at this same location... Dr. Jevin... recounted to Nachrichten aus Israel (News from Israel) how he forced himself through a narrow entrance, went down 16 steps and crawled along a 20-meters long, 60-cm high and 100-cm wide tunnel in order to finally reach a 3.5 x 3.5 meter room. The chamber, tunnel and steps were all made of the same worked stones as the building...

My wife and I were in Israel in 1966, passing from Jordan into Israel. We went through the Mandelbaum Gate, prayed at the Wailing Wall, visited holy sites, including Gordon’s Calvary where we observed the communion sacrament with friends. Since then it has pained me to think Israel would lose any of that land fought for. I believe it was a miracle that they won that war in six days.

OSAKA (Kyodo) The Osaka Prefectural Government has come up with a plan that calls for scrapping Osaka airport at Itami in 2035 when maglev trains are scheduled to start running between Tokyo and Osaka, officials said Thursday. The blueprint proposes using the site to build an international academic town for intensive English-language study with a population of 20,000. The plan also envisages selling the airport site and using the proceeds to build a new maglev line linking downtown Osaka with Kansai International Airport in Osaka Bay. The prefecture expects the plan to accelerate the flow of travelers to Kansai airport...

Highlights of Tokyo Speech: "We seek this deeper and broader engagement because we know our collective future depends on it." "We simply cannot return to the same cycles of boom and bust that led to a global recession. We can't follow the same policies that led to such imbalanced growth."

A new gîte in Nantes offers guests the chance to live as a rodent for the night - complete with fur costumes and a romantic hamster wheel for two...

We Love Russia!!

HE has always been five miles from Gundagai [Australia] but now the nation's most famous dog and his tuckerbox are to be relocated to lure tourists to the town. Historians are outraged at the idea of moving the iconic statue from its spot of 77 years, just off the Hume Highway, to the far end of town to drag tourists through it. The town is split between those who want tourist dollars funnelled into their drought-stricken tills and those outraged at the changing of history. A consultant has been paid $20,000 by the Gundagai Shire Council to survey the community...

Eight British tourists are suing a South African safari park after they became trapped by a pride of wild lions when their tour vehicle overturned. The group are claiming hundreds of thousands of pounds for injuries and post-traumatic stress allegedly suffered when they were exposed to the “threatening conduct of the lions” at Sanbona Wildlife Reserve northeast of Cape Town. One of the animals also stole a boot from the tourists, they say. Papers lodged at Cape Town High Court claim that the injuries were due to the irresponsible actions of Natasha Van der Merwe, a park employee. According to...

UFO fever is sweeping through Germany, no doubt about it. The entire year has been pretty much one long UFO flap with around 500 sightings submitted to various UFO reporting agencies. Sightings have occurred throughout the country and a number of these have been the subject of serious government investigations. These two short films were allegedly taken in the last few days. The first of these (below) comes from the quiet town of Scheuditz in the Saxony district. The witness writes that he ‘I looked out my window and saw a UFO!’ and that he filmed it with a hand-held...

Not just great height, but the total distance of each of the two flights is huge…Video Link

An overgrown lawn could cost a homeowner $1,000 a day. A plan to quadruple the penalty from the current maximum of $250 per day for a first violation is scheduled for consideration at Tuesday night's town council meeting. A repeat violation by the same person would be boosted to $5,000 a day maximum from $500 per day. If the code enforcement board finds that the violation is irreversible — the unapproved removal of an historic tree, for example — the violator would face a maximum fine of $15,000. The current maximum penalty is $5,000. "That's outrageous," said Stefan Harzen, a...

German amateur astronomer Bernhard Christ was in the right place at the right time — due to very careful planning and foresight — and captured this astonishing scene: [Click to embiggen.]That’s the International Space Station crossing the face of the Moon, what astronomers call a transit (like an eclipse, but when something small goes in front of something big). This image is actually a composite of several images taken in a row, with some sharpening to make it cleaner looking. The transit only lasted for 0.4 seconds, so Christ had to be on the ball to capture this. He used...

The Theater of Dionysus lies on the south slope of the Acropolis, on whose heights rose Athens's most sacred temples. Open to the sky, and looking down over the southern part of town, the theater belonged fully to the political and social world of its audience -- unlike our indoor theaters (which cut off the outside world). The beginnings of Greek theater were associated with another radical invention of the ancient Athenians: democracy. Although we find obscure references to earlier dramatists, our first secure date for tragic performances at the City Dionysia comes shortly after the expulsion from Athens of...

O7jimmy singing a short spiritual song, I’m Not Sorry; accompanied with pictorial!

Check out this video of the "Oasis of the Seas" cruise ship. This is the biggest and most expensive cruise ship ever built and it recently sailed from Turku, Finland. It just arrived at the ship's home port in Fort Lauderdale, Florida three days ago on November 11 where it faces a challenge to fill its multitude of berths as we Americans are now struggling under Obama's recession and trying to keep our heads above water. Built at the cost of $1.5 billion, this 16-deck cruise vessel is nearly 40 percent larger than the industry's next-biggest ship and five...

There is no massive statue at Sagami Bay of an angel with a sword and a coronet. No rows of white crosses above “99 Beach.”*** That the region around Tokyo isn't dotted with American war memorials is a matter of science, luck, politics – and endless controversy. These were all objectives in Operation Coronet, the planned seaborne attack on Tokyo in World War II. The greatest battle that never was. Guadalcanal, North Africa, Italy, Tarawa, Saipan, D-Day, Iwo Jima, Okinawa – even the planned invasion of the southern Japanese island of Kyushu – were all prelude. Each a step toward...

To The Point Cruise Lines is excited to offer the ultimate adventure cruise, along the pirate-infested coast of Somalia!

Oasis of the Seas, larger than life on the ocean's horizon Friday morning, swaggered into Port Everglades, sounding her horn as a crowd of onlookers at John U. Lloyd State Park beach let out a cheer. ``Wow!'' cried one early riser, joining revelers with binoculars and blankets to greet the 225,000-ton megaship. `It's so amazing!'' shrieked another. ``It's huge.'' The world's largest cruise ship was accompanied by a flotilla of small boats and doused by water cannons as she headed into her new home port.

REUTERS - Three players from Algeria’s national football team were slightly hurt on Thursday when youths stoned their bus as they arrived in Cairo for a World Cup qualifier against Egypt, Algerian state radio reported. Algeria’s Foreign Ministry issued a statement expressing its “consternation” at the attack, which came two days before the match to decide which of the two teams will take part in the World Cup finals in South Africa next year. A reporter for Algerian state radio said that about 200 young people appeared just as the bus arrived at the team hotel and launched a hail...

Performers take part in a show called Kingdom Of The Dwarves at Kunming World Butterflies Garden, Yunnan province, China

Not hard to figure out the inspiration for this one; frequently active and usually dangerous Mayon is set for another throat-clearing. Mayon erupting: Click for full-size: Mayon not erupting: Context image: Nice panorama (click for full-size):

Han Dynasty (206 B.C.-220 A.D.) city ruins have been discovered in Wuyuan County, Hetao Plain, China's Inner Mongolia. It's said that the scale of the city ruins is rarely seen in Hetao Plain. The city ruins are located in Taal Town of Wuyuan County, Bayannaoer City in China's Inner Mongolia and once covered with grassland. The city wall was about 2 km long and 1 km wide and is made up of compressed earth. The east wall is 2 meters high and remarkably preserved, while, the south wall has already collapsed and is now a road base 80 centimeters high...

A Norwegian man said experts told him the sword he found abandoned at a roadside four years ago dates back 3,000 years. Ernst Skofteland said he asked a team of archaeologists digging on a farm near his home to look at the sword, which he discovered at the side of a lumber road in a forest area four years ago, and they told him it dates from around 1100-900 B.C., Aftenposten reported Friday. "When they told me how old it was, I thought they were kidding me," Skofteland said. He said he turned the sword over to government authorities for...

Images pecked in stone hundreds to thousands of years ago could be for religious reasons, to mark territories or simple doodles such as those still made today by children and adults. That is according to Dr. Ekkehart Malotki, a preeminent researcher into the history of rock art. "Creating art is a distinct piece of our biological make-up," he told about 50 people Saturday during his lecture at Deer Valley Rock Art Center. "It is an instinct." Malotki, a professor emeritus of languages at Northern Arizona University, said no one would ever know the true meaning of images pecked or painted...

Above the Inca capital of Cusco (Q'osco) sits the important ceremonial site and one of human-kinds most impressive constructions called Sacsayhuamán, which despite its global fame still offers up secrets to investigators. Yesterday the discovery was announced of three burials, one of which contained the severed heads of the Inca's enemies. The discovery was made within the archaeological park of Sacsayhuamán in the area of Qowikarana, under threat from illegal settlements of the city's poor. Chief on-site archaeologist Washington Camacho explains that three separate burials were found -- one of an older man buried with a ceremonial knife, one of...

Wet spells in the Sahara may have opened the door for early human migration. According to new evidence, water-dependent trees and shrubs grew there between 120,000 and 45,000 years ago. This suggests that changes in the weather helped early humans cross the desert on their way out of Africa... While about 40 per cent of hydrocarbons in today's dust come from water-dependent plants, this rose to 60 per cent, first between 120,000 and 110,000 ago and again from 50,000 to 45,000 years ago. So the region seemed to be in the grip of unusually wet spells at the time. That...

This is a video of some japanese police officers trying to apprehend an American man living there. He speaks no Japanese but manages to toss them around like rag dolls. Notice how, because of low crime, the bikes aren't even chained up. But now with more Americans, they'll probably rethink that.

LA MARQUE — The owner of one of the world’s fastest production automobiles accidentally drove his fine-tuned, French-built car into a saltwater lagoon Wednesday. The man, who police said was from Lufkin, was uninjured after escaping the partially submerged Bugatti Veyron as it came to rest in about 2 feet of saltwater. The two-seater, with 16 cylinders and four turbo chargers, can reach speeds of more than 250 mph. New models sell for about $2 million. The man, who refused to give his name, was looking at real estate in Galveston. About 3 p.m. a low-flying pelican distracted him as...

The remains of a Minoan-style wall painting, recognizable by a blue background, the first of its kind to be found in Israel, was discovered in the course of the recent excavation season at Tel Kabri. This fresco joins others of Aegean style that have been uncovered during earlier seasons at the Canaanite palace in Kabri. "It was, without doubt, a conscious decision made by the city's rulers who wished to associate with Mediterranean culture and not adopt Syrian and Mesopotamian styles of art like other cities in Canaan did. The Canaanites were living in the Levant and wanted to feel...

Austrian archaeologists have found a Babylonian seal in Egypt that confirms contact between the Babylonians and the Hyksos during the second millennium B.C. Irene Forstner-Müller, the head of the Austrian Archaeological Institute's (ÖAI) branch office in Cairo, said today (Thurs) the find had occurred at the site of the ancient town of Avaris near what is today the city of Tell el-Dab'a in the eastern Nile delta. The Hyksos conquered Egypt and reigned there from 1640 to 1530 B.C. She said a recently-discovered cuneiform tablet had led archaeologists to suspect there had been contact between the Babylonians and the Hyksos....

I walked through the meadows, now overrun graciously with this season’s weeds. Various shades of beige in weed supply is an artist’s pleasure.

JEDDAH: The operation of a monorail system during the Haj next year would facilitate the transport of millions of pilgrims between the holy sites of Makkah, Mina, Arafat and Muzdalifah. Habeeb Zain Al-Abidine, deputy minister of municipal and rural affairs, said the monorails would transport 500,000 pilgrims between the holy sites within six to eight hours. “This will help withdraw at least 30,000 small and large buses from the Haj service,” said Zain .Al-Abidene while addressing a seminar on civil engineering projects for Haj. Zain Al-Abidine said the monorail project, which is estimated to cost SR6.75 billion would bring about...