Praise the Lord!

In her first interview since being released from jail, Paris Hilton told CNN's Larry King on Wednesday that she has never used drugs, isn't a big drinker, and although she feels her incarceration was unwarranted, God had a reason for putting her there.

"Don't serve the time; let the time serve you," Hilton said. "I have a new outlook on life."

From CNN this AM

I can see the future...Paris Hilton, motivational speaker! I can't wait to pony up $50 just for a seat in the auditorium...maybe she'll do a tag-team with Tony Robbins. Now that would rock! The only thing that would make it better was if they got some acrobats from Cirque Du Soleil and maybe a miniature pony or two. There's a video that'll sell like hotcakes! Hotcakes, I tell you!

Okay, celebrity moment over!

As an aside, I used to be a motivational speaker, but I discovered I was insufficiently cynical...certainly something I never would have figured in advance. Interesting bit of trivia...researchers have found what may be the first gunshot victim in this hemisphere...from the Indianapolis Star:

The musket blast was sudden and deadly, the killing nearly 500 years ago of what may have been the first gunshot victim in the Western Hemisphere.

"We didn't expect it. We saw this skull and saw the almost round hole and thought people must have been shooting around here recently," said Guillermo Cock, an archaeologist who found the remains near Lima, Peru.
[...]
To be sure this was a gunshot wound -- making it the earliest one documented in the Americas -- forensics expert Tim Palmbach at the University of New Haven studied the skull and brought in other experts.

Al Harper, director of the Henry C. Lee Institute of Forensic Science in New Haven, Conn., said the team "tried to rule out all kinds of causes of the hole -- a rock from a slingshot, spear, sledgehammer." Harper and Palmbach studied the skull with a powerful scanning electronic microscope.

"We all thought it was a million-to-one chance that we would find any traces of metal on a skull that old, but it was worth a try," Harper said in a statement.

But there they were: fragments of metal from a musket ball surrounding the hole.

What can we deduce from this uber-shooting? Well, head shots work, especially when you're lobbing a lead ball about an inch in diameter. Or maybe the Spaniard was just shooting high...there's an interesting thread on Glock Talk about the propensity of soldiers to shoot high under combat stress. This from one of the posts:

British musket drill manuals from the 18th and early 19th centuries instruct sargents to order soldiers to aim at the cross belt. The tendency was to aim at the chest and shoot over the head. They also warn sargents and officers that most men shut their eyes or look away from the musket lock when fireing.

Not that I have any secret information, but I think firing high under stress is probably a perception problem involving what is or is not the "center of mass" of a person. If our subconscious factors in that big lump on top of our shoulders, the head, when "computing" center mass, our shots are likely to go high on the torso, because the head adds another foot [haha...bad pun!] or so to the size of the body. Secondly, in the shooting process we extend our arm or arms to shoulder level; unless we make adjustments up or down, the bullet's impact is likely to be at shoulder level, which is too high for a true torso center mass shot and too low for a head shot.

Anyway, I can't keep ignoring the endless ringing of my office phone this AM! BTW, am going to be doing some consulting for a National Geo producer I know on the iconic AK-47 for a special on that gun. Ought to be interesting!

Run toward the sound of the ringing phones! To arms! To arms!