samhexum

One of the characters on the show is upset that his wife is leaving him because she's having an affair with a Yankee... Nestor Cortes.

A man committed suicide last night by hanging himself either from the roof or out of one of the upper floor windows in a building about a quarter of a mile from me last night. Cops were called after people saw the body dangling outside the building. Just another day in Queens…

http://Lin-Manuel Miranda attends Yankees-Twins game to watch cousin play

I remember the Ronzoni factory on Northern Blvd in Queens.

An Oregon driver made it rain on a local highway after he tossed out an estimated $200,000 from his family’s bank accounts “to bless others,” according to reports. State police said Colin Davis McCarthy, 38, had been chucking wads of $100 bills from his car’s window along Interstate 5 in Eugene, Oregon, on Tuesday, causing other drivers to slow down and collect the unexpected windfall, Oregon State Police said. After troopers located McCarthy’s car, the generous motorist told them that he was “doing well and wanted to bless others with gifts of money,” Oregon State Police told KVAL-TV. Troopers, who were worried that people looking for cash in the dark on the interstate could cause an accident, managed to convince McCarthy to stop tossing the cash. He estimated that the spread around roughly $200,000 that night, which he had procured by emptying his family’s bank account, KEZI reported. McCarthy currently is not facing any charges, although troopers had considered slapping him with reckless endangerment or disorderly conduct. “He could have been charged in a situation like this for danger being created because of his actions—disorderly conduct, potentially reckless endangering, but most likely disorderly conduct,” Andrews said. McCarthy’s family said that his decision to spread the wealth around has left them broke, and are asking anyone who picked up cash earlier this week to return it. Police ultimately can’t help the family because McCarthy’s name is on the account, Oregon State Police Lt. Jim Andrews said. “Because it’s shared, they both have equal interests in the money.” Why can't this sort of thing happen on the Long Island Expressway? It would be no problem picking up the money since traffic is always at a standstill. https://nypost.com/2023/04/15/oregon-driver-tosses-200k-on-interstate-to-familys-horror-reports/

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ENJOY! You can go grocery shopping 2 blocks away at ShopRite or BJs on 20th Ave afterward. https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g47511-d1957600-Reviews-Spa_Castle-College_Point_Queens_New_York.html Spa Castle closes after elderly man's death at Queens spa 20 Jan 2015 The elderly man who died at the Queens facility, named Hock Ma, was discovered submerged in a hot tub. The medical examiner said he died of a heart attack, but visitors including the woman who found him were concerned it was a patron and not a staff member who found him. A health inspection of the Queens Spa Castle found the popular bathhouse was dirty and unsafe. According to dnainfo.com, the site lacked proper disinfectant and the pools were overpopulated. Spa Castle also failed to notify the health department within 24 hours of Ma's death. https://www.spaopportunities.com/index.cfm?pagetype=news&codeID=313581 NYC’s ‘sex spa’ is grossing people out March 6, 2016 The Spa Castle in Queens is billed as a sprawling, 22-pool Disneyland of soaks and steams. But some patrons are anything but G-rated. On Sunday mornings, an army of exotic dancers getting off their Saturday night shifts descends on the complex — and it’s not to do laps in the pool. “We open at 6 a.m., and lots of strippers come here after work to unwind,” an employee told The Post. “There’s lots of skinny-dipping and the girls are making out with each other and partying. It looks like the set of a porn movie.” During two recent visits, The Post found patrons in their birthday suits, groping each other, making out and having what appeared to be underwater sex. Last Sunday, the clientele ranged in age from toddlers to octogenarians. But that did not stop a group of five heavily tattooed twenty-somethings from engaging in splashy sexcapades in the 2-foot-deep, heated wading pool on the second floor. House music pulsing, one of the women stripped naked and cheerfully played with her breasts while a woman in a yellow-fringe string bikini and a man looked on. A few minutes later, the nude woman stood in front of the seated man while her hand jerked in and out of the water. A couple made out a few feet away. A male member of the group wondered out loud if they should make a liquor-store run. It was not yet 9 a.m. “There is a big problem with customers having sex in the pools, and the management doesn’t know how to handle it,” said the staffer, speaking anonymously. “Practically every day, couples are caught having sex in the indoor and outdoor pools. They think they are being sly about it, but they’re not. When you see somebody on someone’s lap bouncing up and down and the jets aren’t turned on, you know what’s happening.” The mega-spa is the brainchild of developer Steve Chon, 56, who came to New York from South Korea in 1980 when he was 21. A self-described “gambler” with “big guts,” Chon passed on working at the family laundry and studied engineering at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, according to a profile on Inc.com. For two decades, Chon’s forte was building and renovating Korean-run laundries and nail salons. But in 2005, the developer with champagne tastes purchased a ramshackle warehouse on 11th Avenue in College Point for $3.6 million. He envisioned it as a family-friendly hotel-spa. The spa’s Facebook page has even described its mission to create a “light-hearted, family-oriented” ambience. The community board promptly shot Chon down, “deriding the proposal as a thinly disguised ‘hot sheet’ establishment,” the Queens Gazette reported. But Chon gained the support of then-Queens Borough President Helen Marshall, who helped shepherd the project through a series of city approvals. Today it is New York City’s largest spa, with 300,000 annual visitors and sales of “more than $20 million in recent years,” Chon told Inc.com. He opened a second Spa Castle in Texas in 2012 and a third on East 57th Street in Manhattan in 2014. The $25 million, 100,000-square-foot complex offers 21 spa pools, a wading pool, hydrotherapy baths, high-tech steam rooms, 10 gold-tiled saunas and services like facials and body wraps. After paying a $40 entry fee ($50 on weekends), clients don knee-length shorts and T-shirts — blue for men and hot pink for women — along with a watch that serves as both a locker key and charge card for food, drinks, massages and facials. For an extra $290, a client can book a private VIP room for a 90-minute massage that includes herb tea, cookies, fresh fruits and a 30-minute aromatic Jacuzzi. The wading pool is where much of the action occurs. It’s heated and equipped with underwater jets and a swim-up bar. Drinks like the Spa-tini (gin, Chambord and pineapple juice) or the Brainstorm (rum, Disaronno and pineapple juice) run $18 a pop. There is also a kiddie pool, and the steamy behavior often occurs even as children roam the grounds. “I had to stop going on Saturdays because it was like a full-on, urban high-school orgy in the outdoor pool upstairs,” said Whitney Ward, a 42-year-old Manhattan photographer. “Under-the-water mushroom . . . in the outdoor pool I would see lots of girls sitting on guys’ laps and they would be bobbing up and down. It was pretty obvious they were having sex. I’ve also seen guys rubbing one out the wet way.” One spa-goer saw a young girl smuggled into the men’s dressing room. “When she changed clothes, I was shocked to see breasts,” wrote a Yelp reviewer in November who identified himself as John l from Queens. “I did a double take. ‘What the hell?’ I covered up and told the staff, but they did nothing.” David Chan, 46, a Manhattan retail manager, said he saw two guys “rubbing each other off” in a steam sauna in the locker room. “Now I have this picture in my mind of other men’s sperm swimming around in the hot tubs,” Chan said. “This is supposed to be a place where you can bring your family.” A.S. Bunny, 63, a retired nurse from the East Village, said he was once propositioned. “This tiny Korean man came up to me and said, ‘You got big balls. I like them.’ Another time I saw a guy and a girl in the upstairs pool who were in this massive lip-lock and fooling around in the water. When the guy came out of the pool, he had the biggest erection I had ever seen. “I think all the alcohol that they serve there makes people more sexual.” City law states that “no establishment shall make facilities available for the purpose of sexual activities” and that “such facilities shall constitute a threat to the public health.” Only days after Post inquiries, the city Health Department on Tuesday temporarily shut down all of Spa Castle’s pools. It cited the spa for “not following safety standards” and said the closure grew out of an investigation into a near-drowning on Feb. 19, when a 6-year-old girl’s hair became caught in an underwater vent. Spa Castle on Friday submitted a revised safety plan, which is ­under city review. Between 2014 and 2015, the Health Department cited Spa Castle for 49 violations, including failure to post signs prohibiting discharge of bodily fluids in pools. In January 2015, a Manhattan outpost of Spa Castle, Premier 57 Spa, was shut down by health inspectors for operating without a license. In December 2014, an 84-year-old spa-goer was found dead at the bottom of one of Spa Castle’s outdoor hot tubs. An autopsy revealed he died of hypertension and cardiovascular disease, even though family members insisted he was in good health. “The Health Department has repeatedly inspected Spa Castle to assess compliance with NYC rules about bathing establishments,” said a department spokesman. “The department does not hesitate to take corrective actions, including closures, when an establishment is found breaking the law.” The Post’s findings did not shock state Sen. Tony Avella (D-Bayside), who has been lobbying for years to revoke the spa’s license. “I’m not surprised this type of thing is going on at Spa Castle,” he said. “Most of their problems stem from a lack of supervision.” https://nypost.com/2016/03/06/inside-the-sleezy-spa-where-everyone-has-underwater-sex/

Breaking up is hard to do. Ross Cellino Jr. — sole surviving partner of famed, defunct Cellino & Barnes personal injury law firm – plans on snagging tickets to the resurrected eponymous play about his whirlwind breakup with ex-partner Steve Barnes, but told The Post if he could do it all over again, he would’ve kept the pair together. “We should’ve stayed together. I wish we had both set aside our strong feelings. I guess I got stubborn in my position and he did too,” the 65-year-old attorney revealed to The Post in a phone interview. “In hindsight, I remember Steve came to my house during the litigation and he said, ‘Ross why don’t we work this out? I said, ‘OK.’ But it didn’t work out like that,” “I wish things could’ve worked out. I do, too, but that’s ancient history now,” said Steve’s older brother Rich Barnes, 67. Steve Barnes tragically died in October 2020 at age 61 after the plane he was piloting crashed in upstate New York. His niece and Rich Barnes’ daughter, 32-year-old Elizabeth, was also killed. A drama detailing the very public rise and split of Cellino & Barnes, which was cut short during the pandemic, opens Friday, April 14 at an 80-seat, artist space located at 320 W. 23rd St. “Cellino v. Barnes,” which stars playwrights Mike Breen and David Rafailedes and was produced by Cameron Koffman and David Pochapin, runs through May 7. “I’m flattered they would even do that — to be featured in a play. Why would they waste their time with the two of us? We are just lawyers … usually people don’t have a play about lawyers,” Cellino told The Post. The pair rose to stardom over the course of their nearly 30-year partnership that not only transformed the Buffalo-based family law firm that, at one point, employed over 300 attorneys in offices from New York to California, revolutionized the way attorneys attract clients via advertising and as a result, generated multi-millions in profits. The catchy jingle “Don’t wait, call 8” and billboards plastered across the Empire State sent customers seeking legal help in droves — but it was the eventual divorce that was finalized just before Barnes died — that landed the Buffalo boys as the subject of an off-Broadway play. “I introduced the two of them,” Rich Barnes recalled. “I knew Ross and I got to be friendly with his dad, who wanted to retire,” he said, adding that he worked down the hall from Ross Cellino Sr., who started the firm that eventually became Cellino & Barnes. “My brother was working at a big firm in Buffalo and was not happy with it. They met and talked,” he said, recalling the duo’s 1992 introduction. The firm became C&B in 1995. “When they first began with the advertising, there was substantial backlash because the establishment didn’t like the advertising. That slowly died down because the firm became so successful. Then, getting really tremendous results for their clients ended the criticism,” he said. “I ended up joining the firm three or four years after because I saw how successful it was.” Cellino recalled what he described as the beginning of the end with Barnes — also known as “the bald one” in the memorable television and print ads. “Part of the fight between Steve and I was that Steve objected to my daughter [Gina Cellino] joining the firm.” “She had already worked at two other law firms, but he was resolute and adamant about it: that she couldn’t work at the law firm.” So Cellino made the first move in 2017, filing a lawsuit seeking to dissolve the firm — which Barnes fought, arguing the two could resolve differences in the business. Then Cellino was caught trying to poach attorneys in a bid to create a new firm, making the pitch that his surname was superior to his partner’s. “No one ever calls their motorcycle a Davidson,” the attorney wrote in an email pitch, according to court papers filed at the time, drawing the ire of both Barnes and a state Supreme Court judge. The conflict was eventually finalized in June 2020 – just before Barnes’ 2020 death, and the two men started their own, separate firms: Cellino Law Accident Attorneys and the Barnes Firm Injury Attorneys. Per the settlement, they agreed to open separate firms and to share the famous “1-800-888-8888.” “Currently, if you ring today, see who you get. Today it could be Cellino or it could be Barnes,” Cellino said. Rich Barnes said his brother would’ve gotten a kick out of the play. “I think my brother, if he was still with us, would have a change of heart. He was a guy who could take a joke and tell a joke. He had a biting sense of humor having been a Marine Corps officer. Cellino said he saw the pre-pandemic version of the play with his 84-year-old mother. “They turned that into a spoof — somehow that Gina was the love child between Steve and I. I don’t know how we birthed this child together. It was not true, but it was still funny.” Rich Barnes said although he plans on going to the play, he stopped short of saying he’d attend with Cellino. “We have a very cordial working relationship. Ross and I never had any personal animosity,” he told The Post. Cellino's son graces a new billboard campaign The conflict was eventually finalized in June 2020 – just before Barnes’ 2020 death. https://nypost.com/2023/04/13/ross-cellino-on-infamous-cellino-barnes-law-firm-breakup/ Y'all better rush to get your tickets!

The saddest thing in life is wasted talent – and actor Lillo Brancato is spreading that “Bronx Tale” maxim, one addict at a time. Brancato portrayed Robert De Niro’s son, Calogero, in the coming-of-age classic, then won a role as a minor mobster in “The Sopranos.” But in 2005, Brancato’s life infamously spun out of control: hopelessly addicted to crack and heroin, he burgled a friend’s house with an accomplice when a hero off-duty cop who confronted them was shot dead. The actor was acquitted of murder but served eight years for the botched heist. Now he has found a third act: inspiring others to stay clean and steer clear of crime, through both an Instagram account with 95,000 followers, and working at an addiction treatment facility in New Jersey. And he tells The Post, it is the words of De Niro’s “A Bronx Tale” character, Lornezo Anello, that are now his mantra for others: “You can be anything you want to be.” De Niro told The Post through his rep: “It’s good to hear that Lillo has turned his life around, and is using his experience to help others.” At Brancato’s nadir, he snorted up to 20 bags of crack cocaine and heroin a day, he told The Post, often going to extremes to find the next high. On Dec. 10, 2005, Brancato and accomplice Steven Armento busted into a friend’s home in the Bronx during a desperate search for drugs. Daniel Enchautegui, an NYPD officer who lived next door, confronted the pair, prompting Armento to open fire, killing the 28-year-old off-duty cop.or Lillo Brancato on his past with substance abuse: ‘One of the biggest bad choices that I made was to use and abuse drugs and alcohol’ Brancato, who testified during the month-long trial, was convicted of attempted burglary but jurors found him not guilty of Enchautegui’s slaying. He got 10 years in prison, ultimately serving eight years before being released in 2013 from the Hudson Correctional Facility. Armento, whose daughter was Brancato’s ex-girlfriend, got life in prison without the possibility of parole for his first-degree murder conviction in Enchautegui’s slaying. Ahead of the botched burglary, “toward the end” of his ruthless addiction, Brancato said he had spent $14,000 within two weeks on drugs. “I remember that amount specifically because that is what my mom put in my checking account for rehab, which I only went to for two days, and then I cleaned out the rest of the $14,000,” Brancato told The Post. it was while banged up in Rikers that Brancato got clean, last doing drugs there in 2006. Now Brancato, 46, is centering his life on helping others beat addiction too. The Yonkers-based actor has a growing audience on Instagram, where he shares daily inspirational messages to his 94,000-plus followers. He delivers motivational speeches, and he works helps with classed and works as the director of public relations at More Life Recovery Center in Metuchen, where he stresses the notion of culpability. “Just the whole accountability concept, for me, is so important,” Brancato told The Post Wednesday as he drove to a therapy session in Metuchen. “I’m going there now, and we have like 15, 20 kids, and I’m trying to teach them some of the things that I learned along the way. You know, just the mere fact that I am doing that, it kind of holds me accountable,” Brancato said of his weekly Metuchen session. “Because it’s like, ‘bro, you’re telling us all this stuff, teaching us all this stuff,’ so now you have a responsibility to actually live this way.” Brancato said there was a “very symbiotic” relationship he’s cultivated with clients during his three-year tenure at the drug and alcohol addiction treatment facility. “I’m held accountable by them, that I have to do the right thing and live the right way so they can prosper because they’re looking up to me,” he said. “It’s mutually beneficial and it’s, like, exactly where I need to be.” The owner of the outpatient facility, Kenneth Sass, met Brancato in 2020 through a mutual friend and instantly knew how effective he could be helping others overcome their demons. Brancato parlayed that positive first impression into an ongoing “impactful” role at the center, with immediate results, Sass said. “Ever since we tried it, it’s been phenomenal. He’s instrumental in the whole system. “He’s instrumental – period,” Sass said. “I didn’t know that I was going to be that much of an inspiration,” Brancato said of his impact at the addiction treatment center. “But I could see right away I had an audience, just because I guess I had that credibility being that I was away.” Brancato said he is inspired by what De Niro’s character – a proud city bus driver trying to keep his son from turning to crime – told his. “You can be anything you want to be,” Lorenzo Anello tells Calogero when he asks if he can become a baseball player. “Remember, the saddest thing in life is wasted talent. You can have all the talent in the world, but if you don’t do the right thing, then nothing happens. But when you do right, guess what? Good things happen, ya hear me?” That exchange, just 30 seconds in a two-hour movie, still “means so much,” Brancato said. “I realize I have less time in this world, and it becomes much more crucial not to waste your talent,” he said. Brancato made his big-screen return in 2016’s “Back in the Day,” a drama about a young boxer and a mob boss. Enchautegui’s family and the city’s police union blasted the actor’s shot at redemption. But director Paul Borghese told The Post in early 2015: “Everybody deserves a second chance. He’s in a much better place. He was in the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the wrong person.” Brancato also starred in 2021’s “Made in Mexico” and “Sleepyhead,” a thriller set in hell featuring a cameo by actress Taral Hicks – who played Calogero’s girlfriend in “A Bronx Tale” nearly 30 years earlier. The indie film ran at a few film festivals last year, but is now getting reworked, Brancato said. “It’s really awesome, dude,” Brancato gushed of the latter project, featuring himself as a dead utility worker. “It’s so unique and so well done.” And Brancato is also writing a screenplay called “Never Meet Your Heroes,” a drama centered on addiction. Hicks has agreed to costar as his wife, he said. In the upcoming film, he’ll play a degenerate gambler named Joe Preston who loses his job and wife due to his addiction fueled by trauma – the “real gateway” for drug and alcohol abuse, Brancato said. “I was Calogero in the Bronx Tale, but then I when I got in trouble, it’s like, this is Lillo, this is somebody just like us,” he said. “So, when I saw that, I was, like, ‘Wow, this is such a special gift.’ To be able to inspire people is such a beautiful thing.” More than 16 years sober, Brancato, 46, is helping others overcome their addictions. His crack and heroin habit landed him in prison. I remember that people thought that he and his cohort on THE SOPRANOS might've been gay lovers om the show and that the other one was cuter. https://nypost.com/2023/04/13/bronx-tale-star-lillo-brancato-im-clean-after-cop-slaying-and-drug-hell/

Want a whole gallery of him & other hot men with that surname? Feast your eyes: UNRELATED, & NOT ATTRACTIVE ENOUGH TO HAVE THAT NAME:

Don't leave us hanging -- did you win?

Inflation: Egg and other grocery prices start to crack WWW.AOL.COM Grocery inflation is finally seeing some relief, prices down 0.2% in March compared to February 2023. Prices declined for the first time since Sept 2020.

I've made plans to stay home & do nothing.

‘A terrible tragedy’: 7-year-old boy and his teen sister killed in Astoria house fire caused by exploding lithium-ion battery: FDNY

Now's your chance... he's divorcing his wife of 1 year, Shantel Van Santen (Nina on FBI). Maybe she never gave him an erection like this:

Interesting love triangle on STATION 19. Gay firefighter Travis is running for mayor. His cute (British) campaign manager Eli has been flirting and pursuing a relationship with Travis' (female) coworker Andy. Last night, after a TV debate went smashingly well, a pumped-up Travis and Eli kissed -- just as Andy was texting him that she would go on a date with him. WHOOPSIE!!! BTW... I know you're all dying for a SCHMICO update... well, they broke up last season and the (bad) actor who played Nico wasn't brought back this year. Schmidt is now Chief resident and it looks like he went on a SEEfood diet when Nico left. He recently had a fling with a travel nurse named Carlos, who finished his time in Seattle... no word on whether he'll be back.

The team that traded for the NBA's favorite anti-semite will miss the playoffs entirely, as they will finish 11th in their conference. They were 5th when they made the trade. Mazel Tov!

The James Webb Telescope Just Took a Truly Incredible Photo of Uranus I believe that's called an interstellar colonoscopy.

Meet the Whittakers: Inside ‘America’s most inbred family’ that speaks in grunts They redefined “all in the family.” The baying vocals of one inbred family sound like a stereotype relegated to only the most exaggerated and offensive backwoods cult flicks. However, one photographer proved that such communities do in fact exist after documenting the secret lives of the Whittakers — aka “America’s most inbred family,” whose members communicate only in grunts and bark at passersby. “It was out of control — the craziest thing I’d ever seen” documentarian Mark Laita, 63, recalled recently on the Konkrete podcast. He was describing his first ever encounter with the Whittakers, who reside in the rural mountain town of Odd, West Virginia, which boasts an infamously tight-knit population of around 779 people. Laita has spent extensive time with the infamously incestuous clan, first visiting them in 2009 for his book “Created Equal” — and most recently last year for an impromptu reunion. He also chronicles this seldom-seen slice of Appalachia regularly for his podcast “Soft White Underbelly,” which specializes in “interviews and portraits of the human condition” for an audience of 4.56 million YouTube subscribers. The surviving Whittaker family tree is currently comprised of siblings Betty, Lorraine and Ray, as well as cousin Timmy, after their brother Freddie died of a heart attack. However, there is reportedly an unnamed sister and other family members who Laita never met. Of the three remaining relatives, only Timmy graduated high school. During his flagship visit, the camera-wielding raconteur was approached by a shotgun-toting neighbor, who threatened to use it if the production team didn’t leave them be. “They don’t like people coming to ridicule these people,” said Laita, who was eventually allowed to snap pictures despite the initial distrust. Laita analogized the scene to something out of “Deliverance,” director John Boorman’s chilling, Oscar-nominated 1972 film about dueling-banjo mountain folk that’s based on the James Dickey novel of the same name. “There’s these people walking around and their eyes are going in different directions and they are barking at us,” the astonished chronicler explained, “The one guy you’d look at him in the eye or say anything and he’d scream and go running away and his pants would fall around his ankles and he’d go running off and go kick the garbage can. This would happen over and over.” Accompanying footage, taken from a 2021 visit, shows the family on the porch of their run-down dwelling with belongings strewn about like a scene from the Dust Bowl. The West Virginian family has a long and complicated history of inbreeding with early reports stating that the three siblings’ now-deceased mom and dad were brother and sister. The family later clarified that they were double first cousins — meaning that they share both sets of grandparents. Keeping it all in the family led to a host of mental and physical aberrations with some members only communicating via grunts and squawks, as is evident in Laita’s videos posted to his podcast. Despite their communication limitations, the Whittakers seemed to comprehend the photog’s questions. “They understand what you talking about,” a relative told Laita. “If they don’t like it, they start yelling — let you know they don’t like that idea.” According to Thought.Co, a hub of “expert-created education content,” inbreeding can lead to a host of side effects ranging from smaller adult size and reduced fertility to an increased risk of genetic disorders. In rare instances, it can even lead to sapphire-colored skin, as was the case with the infamous Blue Fugates of Troublesome Creek, Kentucky. The Whittakers didn’t seem to grasp that their genetic issues stemmed from self-pollinating the family tree. When the portraitist asked family member Kenneth why their eyes weren’t facing forward, the man responded, “might be coal mining.” Naturally, Laita’s series might seem exploitative, akin to a carnival side show. Melody West and Shane Simmons of the Real Appalachia YouTube channel recently accused the documentary perpetuated the Appalachian inbreeding “stereotype” that has been around “for decades.” However, Laita, who has also shot commercials for the likes of major brands such as Nike and Apple, claimed on Konkrete that he wanted to show the “level of poverty” that the Whittakers faced. The photog has since set up a GoFundMe to help the West Virginian clan with “with living expenses and home improvements.” It has raised nearly $50,000 of its $75,000 goal. In a video taken during Laita’s most recent visit in 2022, Ray is seen taking the photographer on a “Cribs”-style tour around their newly-renovated domicile, which now has a refrigerator, bed with a box spring, and other amenities thanks to the fundraising efforts. At one point, Ray squawks excitedly while showing Laita a dent in their new truck from where it hit a deer. Laita, for one, says that ultimately his goal is to shed light on issues in parts of the country that people seldom see. “People can say that people in Appalachia are leading these wonderful lives, leave them be,” he explained. “But they could also get a lot more support from the government or corporations or something so they could not be digging up roots in the middle of the winter, climbing mountains to survive on $10,000 a year.” He added, “Despite the fact that they don’t complain, it’s a really rough life.” https://nypost.com/2023/04/03/meet-the-whittakers-inside-americas-most-inbred-family/ Country roads, take me home, to the place I belong... West Virginia...

And to her twin brother Lance A. Boyle.

LOVE IT!!!

Tomato and tobacco plants make distinctive sounds when cut or dehydrated, a new study has found. Those sounds change depending on the plant emitting them and the type and severity of the threat that prompts them, according to the study in Cell. The findings shatter the common perception of plants as silent, passive background players to the animal life in their environments. Instead, they show those plants could send out signals that animals in their environment can hear and pick up on — and potentially use to change their behavior. Tomatoes left without water begin making noise “on the second day — even while the tomato still looks good,” Lilach Hadany, a Tel Aviv University mathematician who co-authored the study, told The Hill. The sounds, which somewhat resembled the noise of popcorn popping, peaked after five days of water stress, and then began to decline as the plant dried out. The sounds happen at the approximate volume of human speech but outside the range of our hearing, the study found. They also differed depending on the plant making them and the form of injury, with cut and dehydrated plants making different noises. The research opens the tantalizing possibility that for organisms able to hear these pitches, a landscape of plants is also a soundscape of information — revealing essential information about both plants and the wider environment. Hadany runs a lab at Tel Aviv University in Israel that uses machine learning to study plant evolution, including the emerging field of plant acoustics and, in particular, how plants use sound. The word “use” in the sentence is a landmine in scientific circles: It can imply a level of intent that scientists have traditionally been reluctant to ascribe to plants. Hard consensus on the matter has slowly softened in recent years, however. A considerable body of evidence now suggests that plants emit cues that other plants and pollinators pick up on — in particular by releasing floating airborne chemicals, as Richard Karban of the University of California, Davis has found. It made sense that plants would also use sound, Hadany told The Hill in a video interview — sound takes little energy to produce and carries a long way. But when Hadany began considering earlier in her career whether to investigate whether plants might hear sounds in their environment — and even send audio signals of their own — colleagues warned her to wait for fear of damaging her career. The colleague said, “‘Do not work on it before you have tenure,’” Hadany said, noting that the whole topic had a slightly disreputable flavor in academia. “But now that I am a full professor, it is good,” she said, smiling over the Zoom video. Previous research out of her lab found that some plants can hear — and change their behaviors based on what they are hearing. When her team played the sound of buzzing bees near primrose bushes, their flowers began within a few minutes to release sweeter nectar — something they did not do when exposed to other frequencies, according to a 2019 study her team published in Ecology Letters. The primrose bushes “heard” the bees through the flowers themselves, which perhaps helps explain why bees hover and buzz near flowers, Hadany said. Those 2019 findings opened the door to larger questions, Hadany said. The existence of one such channel of helpful, audible information — which gives pollinators a way to signal their presence to plants, and plants an opportunity to woo them — suggested the kind of two-way relationship that evolution often works to strengthen, she added. “Once you have this interaction, there is selection on both sides to improve hearing and emissions of sounds,” she said. Hearing and interpreting such information can be particularly important to plants, which have an even greater need than animals “to interact with their environment, to respond to the environment — because it cannot go to a different environment,” Hadany said. Plants use environmental information to trigger the production of new chemicals or physiological responses, from generating insecticides or retaining water to turning to follow the sun. Discovering that plants could hear hovering bees led Hadany’s team to ask in Thursday’s paper if they could also transmit news of drought or distress. The team found that they could, through means that are still poorly understood but may involve the release of bubbles through the plants’ stalks. Further study will be needed to determine if other plants — or animals — can hear the sounds of crying tomatoes or tobacco. If they do, such knowledge could drive other nearby plants to take protective action, like closing up their hatches against water loss or bacterial threat, Hadany said. It could also provide a definite advantage to animals who can hear it. For example, moths that lay eggs on tomatoes can hear frequencies in the range that tomatoes are transmitting. Does that mean they are more or less likely to lay eggs on water-stressed plants? Hadany’s group is working on this question. But she noted that Thursday’s findings showed the benefits of scientists arriving “at a project from a completely evolutionarily open question,” rather than assuming they understood how systems worked. https://www.aol.com/news/study-finds-plants-scream-stressed-204053949.html FEED ME! I'M HUNGRY!