April 14, 2006

Matt Helm: The Unofficial Homepage
Probably, those of you who have gone to the trouble to find this site already have an idea who Matt Helm is. If your ideas are based on the Matt Helm motion pictures, this is not the site for you. If your ideas are based on the TV series, this site is not for you. Our Matt Helm is neither the comic agent as portrayed by Dean Martin, nor the sleuth portrayed by Tony Franciosa. The movies and TV show will not be mentioned again.

Here we deal with the Matt Helm who periodically makes the world a safer place, as documented in a series of novels by Donald Hamilton that began with Death of a Citizen in 1960. Our Matt Helm is, to put it bluntly, an assassin working for an unnamed U.S. Government agency, whose job it is to kill people who pose a threat to the United States. If this is the Matt Helm you know and love, read on. Otherwise, go check out a James Bond site somewhere.

Nice graphics!

Dan Brown to start building fence around his property - Boston.com
RYE, N.H. –For author Dan Brown, the price of fame includes having to put a fence up around his home in Rye.

“Dan didn’t want to do this; he’s a quiet person,” his attorney, William Beckett, said of “The Da Vinci Code” author at a selectmen’s meeting last week. “He wants to live like everybody else. But for the safety of his family, he feels he needs to build this fence.”

After taking a look at the property, the Rye Board of Selectmen approved Brown’s request to build.

In the front yard, the fence will have a 2-foot-high stone base supporting 4 feet of wrought-iron fence. As it winds around back, the fence will become all wrought iron. The fence will be 6 feet high all the way around.

Rye not?

FilmStew.com • Harry Potter Faces a Hanging

Radcliffe, now 16, was only 14 when he posed for artist Stuart Pearson Wright while on a break from filming Potter. “It was quite a challenge,” Wright told British paper The Guardian. “As people’s faces get older they get blighted by cynicism and evidence of broken hearts and all the things that go wrong in life… It’s not that Daniel lacked character, it was just that he had an extreme openness and lack of cynicism - and it was difficult to know what to do with that.”

A very interesting quote!

Napa Valley Register Online | OutdoorsSports

At a recent U.S.-Canada symposium on how to help the population, University of Washington researcher David Bain reported declines in foraging of over 30 percent when boats were present. The impact was greater when boats were closer.

Federal law requires vessels to cut their engines at 400 feet and to stay at least 100 yards away to avoid harassing the whales or hindering their ability to find prey through echolocation.

“I think it would help if we enforced the rules we’ve got,” Bain said.

“Last year we recorded about 800 incidents in the summer … and about 550 were for parking in the path of whales,” Pakenham said.

This isn’t working very well …