Quick Takes

Fan overboard

Pierce County Superior Court Judge Beverly Grant probably should have kept the rah-rah to herself. A state disciplinary court recently admonished the Washington judge for leading her entire court in a football cheer days before the Seattle Seahawks played in this year's Super Bowl. Problem: Most found her admonition to join in with a "Go Seahawks" cheer a bit undignified considering she used it at the outset of a sentencing hearing for a man who had been convicted of manslaughter. When attorneys and the nearly 100 others in court that day responded to her cheerleading with stunned silence, she tried again (I can't hear you!).

Just a fur coat away

It's just one more way for every dog to have his day. Longtime Miami wigmaker Ruth Regina has begun crafting canine wigs for dog owners with a pile of cash and a dream of a fashionable dog. The Miami-area wigmaker says she dreamed up the idea to charge between $18 and hundreds of dollars for human-style hair wigs and extensions. "I just see now that the little dogs are being carried around in Chanel carriers. They're wearing tiaras and sunglasses and visors," she told south Florida's Sun-Sentinel. "Dogs are just little people in fur coats."

Year to remember

Quick fact: Numerous polls show Americans struggle to know their own nation's history. But how about the recent past? According to a Washington Post survey of 1,000 randomly selected adults, almost all could name Sept. 11 as the day and month that terrorists attacked the United States by crashing planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. But, surprisingly, 30 percent of respondents could not name 2001 as the year in which the attacks took place.

Left behind-not

Despite not being able to find a really good pair of scissors (and the many other small indignities in a left-handed person's life), new research suggests things are looking up for left-handed men. Lefty men with a college education earn 26 percent more than similarly educated right-handed men, the study found.

Tragedy and mystery

In India, five villagers died in a western town in an attempt to rescue an injured baby pigeon that had fallen into a well. First a young boy fell into the dry well trying to recover the bird. Next, four other townsfolk jumped into the well in an attempt to rescue both the boy and the bird. Reports show all five died of suffocation. Mysteriously, one of the rescue workers who hauled the victims from the dry well said, "We could not locate any pigeon down there."

Lost in space

That's one huge leap for mankind, but quite a large blunder for NASA. The space agency apparently has lost the original video footage of the first moonwalk in 1969. A documentary filmmaker had asked to borrow the footage of Neil Armstrong's famous steps for use in a project, but when NASA went to retrieve the film, the agency couldn't locate it. The magnetic tapes should be at NASA's Goddard Space Center in Maryland, and NASA says it will keep looking for the famous originals until it finds them.