A Komodo dragon at the Virginia Aquarium bit the hand that fed it — literally — but aquarium officials said the incident Friday was likely more due to excitement than betrayal as the popular expression implies.

The condition of the reptile keeper was not immediately available at Sentara Virginia Beach Hospital, but the injury was not life-threatening, the Virginia Aquarium & Marine Science Center said in a statement.

“Sanchez”, the 3-year-old Komodo dragon, was probably excited by the prospect of eating and bit the worker in a “feed response,” said Chip Harshaw, curator of reptiles and mammals.

“These kind of things happen when you work with animals like this. There is an inherent risk, and we know that,” he said.

Harshaw said he came to the worker’s aid as her hand was in the reptile’s grip. It released the worker’s hand after Harshaw put his hand on the neck of the 4 1/2-foot, 20-pound carnivore.

The biting incident was in an area that could not be viewed by visitors, the aquarium said. The aquarium has two other Komodo dragons.

Komodo dragons, which can grow up to 10 feet long and weigh as much as 365 pounds, are only found in the wild on Rinca and Komodo island in eastern Indonesia. There are believed to be 4,000 left in the world.

CAPE CORAL, Fla. – Authorities are looking for a shoplifter who was run over twice by her getaway car after stealing $1,200 worth of designer purses from a Cape Coral store. A T.J. Maxx security guard told police she saw a woman stuff six designer Dooney & Bourke purses into her pants Tuesday morning and walk out of the store. The guard said she was confronting the woman when a car pulled up.

A report said the shoplifter tried to get into the vehicle but fell out and was run over by the car. She then got up and jumped onto the hood of the car. As the car was driving away, the report said the woman fell off and was run over again. On her third attempt, she finally made it into the vehicle.

Police are using the car’s license plate and a check the woman dropped to track her down.

Circuit City was unable to find a buyer for their company. So now they are going to have to liquidate all their remaining assets. There will be a huge sale starting this coming Saturday. Although they are going out of business, don’t expect great things necessarily. Remember you won’t be able to return or exchange them since the franchise will be no more. Also do some comparision shopping, because the prices may say 75 percent off, but could still be higher than competitive stores.

This is definitely bad news for the retail industry as less competition never helps prices. It’s also bad for the 30,000 workers who are soon to be unemployed.

Artist Andrew Wyeth, who portrayed the hidden melancholy of the people and landscapes of Pennsylvania’s Brandywine Valley and coastal Maine in works such as “Christina’s World,” died early Friday. He was 91.

Wyeth died in his sleep at his home in the Philadelphia suburb of Chadds Ford, according to Hillary Holland, a spokeswoman for the Brandywine River Museum.

The son of famed painter and book illustrator N.C. Wyeth, Andrew Wyath gained wealth, acclaim and tremendous popularity. But he chafed under criticism from some experts who regarded him as a facile realist, not an artist but merely an illustrator.

A Wyeth retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2006 drew more than 175,000 visitors in 15 weeks, the highest-ever attendance at the museum for a living artist. The Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford, a converted 19th-century grist mill, includes hundreds of works by three generations of Wyeths.

It was in Maine that Wyeth found the subject for “Christina’s World” his best-known painting. And it was in Pennsylvania that he met Helga Testorf, a neighbor in his native Chadds Ford who became the subject of the intimate portraits that brought him millions of dollars and a wave of public attention in 1986.

Only a jackass brings a grenade to an airport — and cops say that’s exactly what Johnny Knoxville did today.

Law enforcement sources tell us Knoxville was detained this morning at LAX after security found a fake grenade in his carry-on bag. He was in terminal 4 (American Airlines) when a screener saw something suspicious.

Knoxville was detained, cited and released. We’re told the citation was for carrying a “prohibited item” into an airport — replicas of weapons are prohibited.

But check this — Knoxville made his flight.

NICHOLASVILLE, Ky. – Police said a man showed a gun and tried to rob a bank, but he wasn’t in one. The Jessamine South Elkhorn Water District has offices in what was formerly a branch of Farmers Bank. City police spokesman Scott Harvey told the Lexington Herald-Leader a man came into the building Tuesday, showed a pistol and demanded money.

When an employee told the man the office really didn’t have any money, the confused would-be robber replied, “I know you have money. It’s a bank.”

He was told it was no longer a bank and he left with nothing.

Harvey said the office takes payments for water bills, but doesn’t have anything worth stealing.

A rhesus monkey who is know to throw feces when mad is on the loose in Tampa Bay. Authorities have been trying to capture the wild monkey since Tuesday afternoon. No such luck, the monkey evaded a bucket truck and a tranquilizer dart. Wildlife officials say the monkey escaped from an unlicensed source. It was last spotted near Clearwater, Flordia.

The monkey is considered dirty, but not dangerous.

The famous actor from the “Prisoner” TV series dies at age 80. McGoohan was an Emmy award winning actor who helped make the show a cult classic. McGoohan also won two Emmys while playing Edward Longshanks in the film Braveheart and for his work on the detective show “Columbo”. He was most famous for his role as Number Six in the “Prisoner” series in which a former spy(Number Six) is held captive in a small enclave known only as The Village. He is prevented from escaping countless times by an agent known as Number One. McGoohan came up with the concept and wrote and directed several episodes of the show, which has held a devoted following in the United States and Europe for fourty years.

His last big role was in “Braveheart,” in what The AP called a “standout” performance as the tyrannical king who battles Scottish freedom fighter William Wallace, played by Gibson.

McGoohan is survived by his wife and three daughters.

• These are some songs from the Make Believe Album produced by Platinum Weird records.
• All songs written by Kara DioGuardi and Dave Stewart
• Some of the vocals are performed by Kara DioGuardi
• Kara DioGuardi is the newest judge on American Idol

1. Will You Be Around
2. Lonely Eyes
3. Happiness
4. Make Believe
5. Picture Perfect
6. If You Believe in Love
7. Love Can Kill the Blues
8. I Pray
9. Piccadilly Lane
10. Goodbye My Love

Carol A. Bartz was the CEO at Auto Desk from 1992 until 2006. According to Forbes, “Since 1992, Bartz, 56, has transformed Autodesk from an aimless maker of PC software into a leader of computer-aided design software, targeting architects and builders.” She is credited with instituting and promoting Autodesk’s “3F” or “fail-fast forward” concept — the idea that you engineer a company to fail in certain missions, to be resilient to failure, and to respond to it by overcoming quickly. It is reported that she is under strong consideration to replace Jerry Yang as the CEO of Yahoo Inc. On January 13th, 2009, the Wall Street Journal announced that Carol Bartz had accepted an offer to be the next CEO of Yahoo, succeeding outgoing CEO & co-founder Jerry Yang.

Bartz received a BA in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin.

source: Wikipedia