Man Finds 56-Pound Mushroom in Missouri
(Maysville is one of two small towns my parents grew up near)
Oct 27 The mushroom Ty Whitmore found on a relative's farm near the northwest Missouri community of Maysville this week tipped the scales at 56 pounds _ and that was only part of it.

Whitmore, 19, of Kansas City, was cutting firewood Monday when he saw the orange and yellow mushroom growing from the base of a maple tree. He cut it off with a saw and said the biggest half of it fell into a creek...Whitmore got it to his pickup truck, half a mile away, and had it weighed at a Maysville grocery store...

...The mushroom, measured Tuesday by a Missouri Department of Conservation, was 30 inches wide and 16 inches high. Harold Burdsall, a retired U.S. Forest Service fungus expert in Madison, Wis., said after looking at e-mailed photos that it was the biggest sulfur shelf mushroom he had ever seen.

James W. Kimbrough, an expert on molds, mildews and mushrooms at the University of Florida, said reference books list the biggest sulfur shelf mushroom as being about 20 inches wide...and the one Whitmore discovered has "got to be among the largest ever found in North America."

Burdsall says sulfur shelf mushrooms taste great, with a firm texture and plenty of flavor.

"If there are two wild mushrooms on the table, I'd always take that one, even over morels," he said.

The mushroom probably took about two weeks to grow. Whitmore said the part that fell into the creek was a larger clump growing on top of the one he got. He said the water was too cold and deep for him to retrieve it.

"It might have weighed 120 pounds altogether," he said.
http://www.breitbart.com/news/2005/10/27/D8DGLAL85.html

Suicide Mistaken for Halloween Decoration

Oct 27 FREDERICA, Delaware .The apparent suicide of a woman found hanging from a tree went unreported for hours because passers-by thought the body was a Halloween decoration, authorities said...The body, suspended about 15 feet above the ground, could be easily seen from passing vehicles.

State police spokesman Cpl. Jeff Oldham and neighbors said people noticed the body at breakfast time Wednesday but dismissed it as a holiday prank. Authorities were called to the scene more than three hours later...
http://www.breitbart.com/news/2005/10/27/D8DGIS500.html

This shows the hypocrisy of the Hollywood anti-gun crowd. They claim they hate guns but they shure don’t mind getting rich using them to shoot people in the movies they make. Yeah, when you can afford security personnel and security systems it’s easy to say no one should have guns. How about disarming their guards?
I don't like guns, says the new James Bond
26/10/2005 Daniel Craig, the actor chosen to portray a tougher, grittier James Bond more akin to the cold-blooded killer conceived by the spy's creator Ian Fleming, admits he is scared of guns…"I hate handguns. Handguns are used to shoot people and as long as they are around people will shoot each other…Bullets have a nasty habit of finding their target and that's what's scary about them."
http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/10/26/nbond26.xml

Economy Grows at an Energetic Rate in 3Q...
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20051028/D8DH2AVG8.html

Farmer Finds 11-Foot Python Curled in Corn
Oct 26 GERMANTOWN, Iowa This year's harvest will be memorable for Fred Schuknecht, not so much for his crop of corn, but what he found in it _ an 11-foot python.
"It was coiled up in a roll between two rows of corn. I thought it was a tire laying in the field," he said Wednesday.
...He and his father took the snake to town in a cardboard box and had it weighed at the grain elevator _ 45 pounds. They measured it at 11.5 feet.
...The Department of Natural Resources took the snake to a reptile nature center in Ames. Schuknecht said he since has learned that it belongs to a man near Germantown. "He'd been missing it since the first part of July," Schuknecht said.
http://www.breitbart.com/news/2005/10/26/D8DG4ALO7.html