Waiting it out may not be a practical option; Mount Wingen in NSW, Australia has a coal seam under it that is estimated to have been burning for more than 5,000 years, the oil shales under the Smoking Hills in Canada's Northwest Territories have been burning for centuries, and a coal seam at Brennender Berg in Germany has been burning since it was accidentally ignited in 1688.

Looks like a surveyor's plumb

My response would be "If I gave you my account name and password, that act would be grounds for you not to hire me. If I would violate the terms of service for Facebook so readily, what reason would you have to believe that I would abide by the terms of an employment contract?"

The 1844 death of Josie must be a typo; the picture of the headstone shows her dates as 1861-1944. If she'd died in 1844, then she couldn't have been buried next to Wyatt, much less married to him, as he wasn't even _born_ until 1848.

From a piece on the news about him and the Halloween light show, he says he doesn't do anything for Christmas because of all the work he puts in for Halloween's display.

It's particularly entertaining to see people complaining about usage -- 'gotten' is one particularly egregious example -- that _originated_ in Britain, but the usage was preserved in America while falling out of use elsewhere ('gotten' surviving in more common parlance only in 'ill-gotten').

If I could walk that way, I wouldn't need the cornstarch...

Splitting an arrow with wood shafts is going to be extremely difficult because of the difficulty in getting a shaft with wood grain that is uniformly parallel to the shaft. Modern aluminum or fiberglass tubular shafts would make it much easier, as would bamboo shafts, which are already tubular in nature. Regardless of the shaft construction, though, the nock, which has to be sturdy enough to take the stress of shooting the arrow, would have to split cleanly in order that the second arrow not deflect -- you will note in the video that the arrow in the target has no visible nock; it is not clear whether it was shot without a proper nock so that the hollow center of the shaft remained unobstructed, or whether the nock on the first arrow was removed after it hit the target.

Looks like a toothbrush for Jaws, the henchman in the Bond films "The Spy Who Loved Me" and "Moonraker".

This should be reviewed in the light of Charles Darwin's famous treatise "Oregano on Species", where he put forth the premise that all food evolves from lower forms of food, driven by the spur of 'survival of the tastiest. Dinosaurs did not become extinct due to an asteroidal impact, but because they failed to provide an appetizing meal (you don't see cows, chickens, and pigs going extinct, do you?) -- theropods tasted _terrible_ when cooked in the Colonel's secret herbs-and-spices recipe, and sauropod meat had a persistent slimy texture that resulted in it slipping out of the bun if not held completely level. (But what about armadillos, porcupines, and aardvarks, you say? You must never have eaten French cooking.)

(abridged mercilessly from a short story that appeared in Analog magazine in, IIRC, the 1970s)

I've always been more partial to "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the firepower to make the difference."

The Upper Peninsula, millions of years ago, broke off from Michigan proper. In order to prevent its ecosystem from collapsing, it was hurriedly grafted onto Wisconsin to prevent an ecological disaster. Unfortunately, now, Wisconsin is rejecting the transplant.

For people looking for more ghost signs, James Lileks has a collection of ghost signs at http://www.lileks.com/ghost/index.html

Ghodamus is correct; it's a Japanese stirrup, probably from the Kamakura period.

The etymology of 'Mark Twain' is incomplete; the sounding line used by leadsmen to measure the depth of water had markers inserted in the lead line at specific distances from the weight -- a two-lobed piece of leather at two fathoms, a three-lobed piece of leather at three fathoms, a white calico strip at 5, a piece of red bunting at 7, a piece of leather with a hole in each end at 10, and so on. When the leadsman threw the sounding line, he would call out a measurement of the depth of the water based on the marker that was in the leadsman's hand (the sounding line had to account for how far above the water the leadsman's position was) -- 'By the mark two', 'by the mark five', 'A quarter less six', etc. Leadsmen for riverboats in the Mississippi would use the archaic 'twain' instead of 'two', calling out 'By the mark twain' to indicate there was two fathoms of water under the boat, more than sufficient depth to keep the shallow-draft vessels from running aground -- a sternwheeler riverboat might have a draft of as little as three feet.