Blog Heap of Links for the day 26 December 2015

A New Jersey man was reunited with his wedding ring this month after it fell off his finger and sank to the bottom of the ocean while he was fishing.… salvage diver Mark Thompson… found the ring, he said, resting on a rock - in 10 minutes.…

…A German Christmas card with just "England" on the envelope has reached the right address in Gloucestershire. Paul Biggs, from Longlevens, said he was absolutely shocked when his postman arrived at his front door with the card from his friends in Bitburg in Germany. …The card, it is believed, may have originally been addressed correctly and so was sent to the right area of England - but with an address label that fell off at some point.…

Elizabeth Laird doled out an estimated half-million hugs to American troops at Fort Hood, sending them off to war with a reassuring embrace and welcoming them back home with those same open arms.

Elizabeth LairdShe kept up those hugs—along the way becoming known as “the hug lady”—through a decade-long fight with the breast cancer that ultimately claimed her life on Christmas Eve at the age of 83 …

…“I’d just made a documentary about the best baseball player in the world,” Mendelson tells Comic Riffs, referring to his award-winning NBC work about Willie Mays. “So I decided to make a documentary about the worst baseball player in the world.”

That, naturally, would be Charlie Brown. Mendelson read a “Peanuts” strip about the perennially losing hurler and thought: Why not make a documentary about the cartoon’s creator?

It turned out to be the best pitch Mendelson ever made.…

The leader of a powerful faction of Syrian “rebels” was killed today by a Russian airstrike in the suburbs of Damascus. Zahran Alloush was secretly meeting with other leaders of the group Jaish al-Islam (Army of Islam) when he was killed.

In other news, a federal judge has declined to dismiss a criminal case against a North Philadelphia woman who supported the jihad in Syria and attempted to travel there to join it. The judge says that it will be up to a jury to decide whether the woman’s attempted actions were protected by the First Amendment.…

I didn’t have time to do much of a news feed tonight — just a few items here.

The news doesn’t have much Yuletide cheer in it, anyway. Rather than read the news, you’d be better off lacing your eggnog with something strong and then decorating the tree.

Merry Christmas, everybody! …

I didn’t have time to do much of a news feed tonight — just a few items here.

The news doesn’t have much Yuletide cheer in it, anyway. Rather than read the news, you’d be better off lacing your eggnog with something strong and then decorating the tree.

Merry Christmas, everybody! …

…On this day in 1846 while trapped in snow in the Sierra Nevadas and without food, some members of the Donner Party resorted to cannibalism. The location of that act became known as Donner Pass…