Tasmania Berlin, Worst Soccer Team Ever

Every time a team goes through a bad patch, fans ask themselves how long is it going to last and they wonder if there is any team in history that has done so bad. That's what River Plate supporters may have been thinking for the last eight months, when the most leagues winer team in Argentina hasn't been able to win a single match as a visitor. Well, there is one, and this one is going to be hard to oust. So soccer's fans can feel relieved. In Bundesliga season 1965-1966 took place the legendary campaign of the Tasmania Berlin, a team that the Germanic fans describe as 'the club of the records impossible to break'. Maybe there are other soccer teams in other major leagues that share one, two or even three of the following facts with Tasmania Berlin, but there is just one in the whole world that can be 'proud' of holding them all:

• 50th out of 50 in all-time Bundesliga standings
• fewest points collected in a season: 8 points under the old scoring method of two points for a win
• fewest wins in a season: 2
• most defeats in a season: 28
• only Bundesliga team without an away win
• longest winless streak: 31 games (August 14, 1965-May 21, 1966)
• most home defeats in a season: 12
• most consecutive home losses: 8 games (August 28, 1965-December 8, 1965)
• most consecutive homes matches without a win: 15 matches (August 24, 1965-May 21, 1966)
• most consecutive losses: 10 matches
• worst ever goals for-and-against: 15:108
• fewest ever goals for a team's leading scorer: 4 by Wulf-Ingo Usbeck
• biggest losing margin at home: 0:9 to Meidericher SV (March 26, 1966)
• smallest ever crowd at a Bundesliga game: 827 (January 15, 1966 against Borussia Mönchengladbach) after crowds of 81,500 at their first home game and 70,000 at their second

Yves Saint Laurent, Richest Dead Celebrity

2009 richest dead celebrity is Yves Saint Laurent, according to Forbes magazine. The French fashion designer, who died of brain cancer in June 2008, earned $350 million in the past year, when most of his estate was auctioned off at Christie's. For the second time in the last decade Elvis Presley is not the top-earning dead celebrity (Kurt Cobain "achieved" to beat Elvis in 2006).

Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein are second with combined earnings of $235 million, followed by Michael Jackson with $90 million, King Elvis Presley with $55 million and J.R.R. Tolkien with $50 million. Charles M. Schulz, John Lennon, Theodor Geisel, Albert Einstein and Michael Crichton close the top 10 list.

After Michael Jackson's This is it opening night this week, the King of Pop is going to be the King of Graveyard in the coming years. You can bet your bottom dollar on it.

Ice Age Scrat, Guinness World Record Tallest Ice Sculpture

An ice sculpture inspired by Scrat, character of the saga of films Ice Age, has broken the Guinness World Record for Tallest Ice Sculpture. The ice tower measures 48,8 feet and has beaten by nearly 8 feet the ice statue built in Dubai in 2006 that was, until now, in possession of the record.

Scrat ice sculpture was unveiled yesterday at ICE at Santa Monica, Downtown Santa Monica's outdoor ice skating rink. The Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertaintment project started months ago and has needed over 133,000 pounds of ice, gathered across four states, and the work of 14 sculptors for 4 full days.

The presentation of the sculpture, timed with the Blu-ray and DVD release of Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, was supervised by security forces because of of the strong wind and the high temperature.

World's Larget Rocket Launched Successfully

After yesterday's failed attemp, NASA has launched today at 11.30 a.m. the world's largest rocket, Ares I-X, from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Ares I-X is part of the Constellation Program, that has been developing new vehicles that would replace space shuttles, which will be phased out in 2010. The rocket has cost $445 million dollars and has taken about 2 minutes in taking off.



For the first time in more than a quarter of century, this launch means a flight test for NASA's next-generation spacecraft and launch vehicle system, and it should provide the agency with an opportunity to test and prove flight characteristics, hardware, facilities and ground operations associated with the Ares I. In other words, the Constellation Program develops a spaceship for the American manned space flight after the retirement of the space shuttle and the flight test is part of NASA's mission to someday return astronauts to the moon and later travel to Mars.

If the Constellation Program moves forward, US would be able to take astronauts into space in five years. Currently, Russia has the monopoly of puting humans in orbit. The last person to be fired into space was the world's richest clown, canadian Guy Laliberté, founder of the Cirque du Soleil, who a month ago, on board a Soyuz rocket, headed for the International Space Station, becaming Russia's seventh "space tourist", with a 12-day trip thar costed him $35 million. Not a cheap vacation at all! Lalibeté took off from Kazakhstan with the US astronaut Jeffrey Williams and the Russian cosmonaut Maxim Surayev.



While in the International Space Station, Laliberté had the time to be the gest of U2 show in Tampa.



Fortunately, the 12th tourist space adventure had a happy ending.

Amelia Earhart, Largest Rescue Attempt Ever

World's best-known aviatrix Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan were on their second attempt to fly around the world when they disappeared over the central Pacific Ocean near Howland Island, on July 2, 1937.


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Sixty-six planes and 4,ooo people on nine ships covered about 250,000 square miles of the Pacific Ocean to find the them, but after 16 days and $4 million, on July 19, naval authorities decided to end it. The search for Amelia's airplane has been the largests rescue attempt ever made for a single lost plane, and, also, the most costly and intensive search by the Navy and Coast Guard in US history up to that time.



Amelia and Fred Noonan had departed from Miami two months earlier and before getting lost, about 22,000 miles of the journey had been completed, through South America, Africa, the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia. The remaining 7,000 miles would all be over the Pacific. Although Amelia's family went on searching for years, neither the bodies no the plane were found, and Fred Noonan was declared legally dead on June 26, 1938, while Amelia was on January 5, 1939. But not everybody was satisfied with this end of the story, and many theories emerged after the disappearance of Amelia and Noonan.



Amelia was the first woman to receive the Distinguished Flying Cross for becoming the first aviatrix to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. She set many other records, wrote best-selling books about her flying experiences, and was instrumental in the formation of The Ninety-Nines, an organization for female pilots. You can see her story opening today at theaters.

Windows 7, Microsoft Newest Operating System

Microsoft begins to sell today Windows 7, the new operating system called to replace the unlucky Vista and the still today successful XP, living a second youth since Vista was acknowledged to be its unworthy heir.

Windows 7 keeps what’s good about Windows Vista, like security, stability and image, and reconducts most of those aspects people disliked. However, it's seen by everybody, even by Microsoft, XP successor. These are the words used by Microsoft to announce Windows 7 on its website:

"Hanging onto Windows XP? See what you're missing:

1. Use Snap to compare two files side by side with a quick drag to the edge of the screen.
2. Cruise through all your open windows with Live Taskbar Previews.
3. HomeGroup takes the headache out of sharing files, devices, and printers on a home network.
4. Keep your favorite files and programs handy: Pin them to the Taskbar.
5. Quickly find virtually anything on your PC with Windows Search".

Not only users but also Microsoft want to forget three years of Vista unpleasant experience. The time has come.

1933 Double Eagle, World Most Valuable Coin

A 1933 Double Eagle has the record for highest price paid at auction for a single coin. On July 30, 2002, at Sotheby’s in New York, it was sold to an anonymous bidder, in less than nine minutes, for a final price of $7,590,020.00, almost twice the previous record for a coin ($4,14 million for the 1804 Silver Dollar). The mysterious owner loaned it to the American Numismatic Society and currently the most valuable coin is displayed at the New York Federal Reserve Bank. Unbelievable, isn’t it? Even more since it's not the only 1933 Double Eagle existing. It's its odd story what has made this small piece of stamped gold the most valuable coin in the world.

Back in 1849, and because of the California Gold Rush, the United States Mint decided to issue $20 gold coins instead of the traditional $10 pieces, known as eagles (that's why $20 coins are called double eagles). In 1933, it last year of production, 445,500 specimens of double eagle were minted, but they never oficially circulated: trying to end the 30s general crisis, US president Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an Executive Order by which gold coins were declared no longer legal, so people had to turn in their gold coins and have them changed for other forms of currency (there was an exemption for collector coins, that could keep their 'small treasures'). All 1933 gold coins were melted down except two of the $20 Double Eagles, that were presented to the American Numismatic Society Collection.

These two coins should have been the only 1933 Double Eagle coins in existence, but a number of them, possibly nine, were stolen before being melted down, possibly by an US Mint cashier, and circulated amongst collectors until the US Secret Service began an official investigation and  recovered for the US Government eight of the coins during the period 1944-1952. So that leaves us with one coin missing, the one that was acquired by King Farouk of Egypt, who had a collection of coins of over 8,500. In 1944 King Farouk bought a 1933 Double Eagle, and after a chain of mistakes of the US Treasure Department, he got an export license for the coin. In 1952 King Farouk was deposed in a coup d'etat, and many of his possessions went for public auction at Sotheby's, but the Double Eagle coin wasn't found among them.

Forty years later the US Secret Service arrested British coin dealer Stephen Fenton in New York when he was trying to sell a Double Eagle coin in New York. At first he said that he had bought the coin at his shop, and later swore that the Double Eagle came from the collection of King Farouk, though this could not be ascertained. In July 2001, the case ended with the agreement that the ownership of the gold coin would return to the US Government, and then it could be legally sold at auction (as you may have guessed, this is the $7,59 million Double Eagle). Believe it or not, until this agreement, the Double Eagle was kept in a place that was believed to be safe: the Treasury vaults of the World Trade Center. Only three months before it was destroyed, the coin was transferred to Fort Knox.

In August 2005, the US Secret Service announced the recovery of ten additional stolen 1933 Double Eagle gold coins. But no worries for the owner of the only Double Eagle auctioned, his is the only in existence that is legal to own. The rest belong to the US Government and are held at Fort Knox.