Kaiser's African Gunship Enjoys New Lease on Life

"Almost 100 years ago, the German Kaiser ordered a warship to be secretly constructed and carried in pieces over mountains to help hold on to Germany's prize African colony. The battered ship is now receiving help from an unlikely source -- the German state where it was first made.

It's really all his grandfather's fault. When Hermann-Josef Averdung was a boy, his grandfather would often tell him about the most wonderful ship he had ever helped build -- and about the great adventure it embarked upon.

Averdung is now 66 years old. His hair is white, and he is a councilman in the northern German city of Papenburg. But the years have not dimmed his memory of this story. The story, in fact, has brought him to where he is now: standing at dawn on a rusty pontoon on Lake Tanganyika, in the heart of Africa. As a large ship slowly glides up alongside the pier, Averdung goes weak in the knees, and tears well up in his eyes. Its name, Liemba, is still visible on the front of the hull..."

Centuries-old slipper found on Canna is preserved

"A shoe dating from the 17th Century found in a box under a bed on the island of Canna has been carefully preserved.

The National Trust for Scotland, which owns the isle off Skye, said the artefact was so rare a storage box has been specially made to conserve it..."

In Joseph Stalin's birthplace, tyrant is finally toppled

"For over half a century a forbidding statue of Joseph Stalin loomed over Gori, the Georgian town where the Soviet Union's most notorious tyrant was born. Nearby is the modest one-storey hut where the young Stalin grew up. There is also a museum, complete with Stalin's personal railway carriage, portraits and letters.

But in a secret operation early today Georgia's pro-western government ripped the monument down. The six-metre high bronze statue of Stalin kitted out in a full-length general's overcoat is to be moved into the museum courtyard..."

Who is down there?

A few weeks ago we located the grave plots of my Uncle Roderick and Great Grandmother at Witton Cemetery in Birmingham. What we asked the Cemetery to do though was to check the records and confirm who was in the plots. We thought both had 2 occupants.

It was confirmed that this plot contained my Great Grandmother Rose Ellen Grant and also George Henry Walter John Grant . Both passed away during World War 2.

The second plot details showed however how old hand written records can be troublesome. Uncle Roderick was listed as Robert Roderick (middle name first) and my Great Grandfather Stephen Morris was listed as being Stephanie!

Photography exhibition reveals life on the canals in the 1940s and 50s

"Robert Longden's evocative pictures of working life on Britain's inland waterways of the 1940s and 50s are being shown for the first time.

It seems fitting that the Herbert Art Gallery in Coventry should be hosting an exhibition of Robert Longden's evocative pictures of working life on the inland waterways of the 1940s and 50s. Longden's employer was Sir Alfred Herbert, a local philanthropist who ran the biggest machine-tool company in the world from a factory that backed on to the Coventry canal. Both men died in 1957. Herbert bequeathed the gallery to the city and Longden's photographs are about to be shown there for the first time..."

Apostle images from 4th century found under street in Italy

"Archaeologists exploring a Christian catacomb under a residential Roman street have unearthed the earliest known images of the apostles Andrew and John.

Using a newly developed laser to burn away centuries of calcium deposits without damaging the paintings beneath, the team found the late 4th-century images in the richly decorated tomb of a Roman noblewoman..."

Saving "virtual worlds" from extinction

"Sometime this August, librarians at the University of Illinois will finish archiving over a dozen famous computer games, then step back to consider where to go next with their project. These programs go back over four decades, and include a 1993 version of Doom, various editions of Warcraft, and even MIT's Spacewar! circa 1962.

We wondered, given the gaming nature of most of the software being preserved, why the venture is calling itself the Preserving Virtual Worlds project. So we called up the project's coordinator, Jerome McDonough, Assistant Professor of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois, to ask him about the name..."

Hopefully they can preserve those hills in Pole Position, i got a stash in them tha hills.