When my daughter was two or three, my wife and I were having a laugh about the tongue to nose trick (her sister can do it). I asked my daughter if she could stick out her tongue and touch her nose; she stuck out her tongue and touched her nose with her finger, then looked at us like we were crazy when we cracked up laughing.

One question I have about the paralyzed finger trick; if you can't lift your ring finger when your middle finger is pulled back because the tendons are connected, why can you lift the middle finger when the ring finger is pulled back? Seems to me that if they are connected, you should be able to reverse it. Anyone?

Why not?

And there're more Bluesmobiles at BluesBrothersCentral.com.

I remember hearing about this in 1986, and when my wife & I visited Cameroon in 2003, people we spoke with in Wum and Bamenda still had not gotten over it. There is the scientific explanation of what happened, then there is the locals' version; an evil spirit (or spirits) living in the lake had become angered and killed everything near the lake. As logical as the real cause sounds to us, the legend is more plausible for the locals, who mostly practice native animistic religions. Even some who are Christian or Muslim & others who are somewhat Westernized have a tough time accepting the real cause of it.

Cameroon also has another active volcano; Mount Cameroon. That one erupted with a large lava flow in 2001, and when I was there we saw the tail end of the flow; it was a gigantic mound of black boulders that crossed a main highway and stopped about 20 yards past the road. In 2003, we stopped to take a look (in the dark!) and the rocks were still warm to the touch. Because of the heat and the sheer bulk of it, they haven't been able to remove it from the road, but there's now a dirt detour through the jungle to take you around it.

The satellite image available on Google Maps even shows the flow crossing the road (but unfortunately no high-res image for that area.) If you click that link, you can pan to the north-east & follow the flow to its source on the side of Mt. Cameroon. Go to the peak and you can see other recent lava flows. And the sand on the beaches near there is pitch black, most likely from all of the lava flows in the past.

And if you zoom out in the Google Earth satellite image, turn on the Map or Hybrid feature and scroll further north-east, you can pick out Wum; Lake Nyos is a fairly small lake a little further north-east of there. If you do a Google Maps search for Lake Nyos, Cameroon, it'll pinpoint it for you. The amazing/cool thing is that if you zoom out on the satellite image, it looks like the very roots of the earth are exposed in that area. Very, very, very remote, and very, very mountainous. The elevation of Lake Nyos is just under 10,000 feet (3,000 meters). The "highway" that you can see if you turn on the Map or Hybrid feature in Google Maps is little more than a dirt road. Getting the venting mechanism into Lake Nyos was a major undertaking; anything more than that, like your turbine generator, would take huge amounts of outside help; the locals don't have the money nor the need for electricity, although if it were available, they'd make use of it. But as remote a place like that is, it's amazing how many people carry cell phones!

Lots more info on the ongoing de-gassing here (also linked above.)

Gotta wonder what Bill Clinton was doing to that sheep that made it want to beat him up.