FINGERPRINT FOIBLES
• In Miami in 1990, police arrested a suspect who was thought to be a drug dealer. Upon fingerprinting him, they found his fingerprints running in all sorts of crazy zig zag patterns. It was like nothing they had ever seen before. Tommy Moorefield, an FBI expert on fingerprints, examined the fingerprints and concluded that the man had sliced the skin on his fingertips into tiny pieces and then transplanted those pieces onto other fingers. After the fingertips healed, his new fingerprints ran in all directions. Moorefield took photographs of the fingerprints and cut them into small pieces, then began fitting them together like a jigsaw puzzle. Before long he was able to match the reassembled fingerprints to a fugitive connected to another drug case. The suspect was convicted.
www.facebook.com/tidbitsgf
Answer
Depression. The new name was derived from the size of the soda bottle (7 ounces) and "bottoms up," which is presumably what many people did during the difficult years of the • Board games date back at Depression. least 5,000 years, when people • A man in Orange County, Calwere playing on a board that ifornia, stole a diamond worth looks like an ancestor to back- $25,000 and, despite being argammon. rested for the crime, was able to • The next time you're over- smuggle it into prison with him whelmed with emotion and by swallowing it. He then manfind yourself passionately kiss- aged to hide the gem in a showing your partner, you probably er drain in hopes of retrieving won't remember that one word and swallowing it again beto describe what you're doing fore his release. All that effort was in vain, however; prison is "deosculation." guards found the diamond and • It was in 1958 that the first returned it to the jewelry shop. stereo phonograph record went • If you're using an average on sale. brand-new pencil, you'll be able • The soft drink 7-UP was orig- to draw a line about 35 miles inally called Bib-Label Lithi- long before running out of lead ated Lemon-Lime Soda -- and (though you'll have to stop for it contained lithium, which is sharpening breaks, of course). now prescribed to treat manic * * depression. That ingredient * Thought for the Day: (which continued to be part of the formula until the 1940s) "Try to learn something about probably helped spur the everything and everything drink's success, since 7-UP was about something." -- Thomas introduced just before the Great Henry Huxley
Weekly SUDOKU
• It was Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdos who made the following sage observation: "Problems worthy of attack prove their worth by fighting back."
Answer
by Samantha Weaver
King CROSSWORD
© 2014 King Features Synd., Inc.
• In 1941 a Texas cop stopped to question a hitchhiker. When asked to show his ID, he said he had lost it. The officer noticed his fingertips looked odd. The officer took him in for questioning. After being fingerprinted, the police were fascinated to find he had no fingerprints whatsoever. The man said he was born like that. Police had their doubts and detained him while they consulted the FBI. The FBI instructed police to search the man's body for scars. On each side of his ribcage there were five oval scars. When he held his arms folded across his chest, his fingers fit perfectly over the scars. A crooked doctor had removed the skin from his fingertips, then cut out small patches of skin from his chest. His arms were folded across his chest and his fingertips taped over the wounded skin. When new skin grew from his sides, it adhered to his fingertips in a natural skin graft. Alerted, police sent photos of the man across the nation. He was identified as a specialist in safe blowing, wanted for three jobs.