Is Obama Too Antarctic to Be President?

The publisher of Israel Insider believes that Barack Obama's birth certificate is a forgery.

It has become even more suspect with the revelation that variations of the certificate image were posted on the Photobucket image aggregation website -- including one listing the location of Obama's birth as Antarctica, one with the certificate supposedly issued by the government of North Korea, and another including a purported photo of baby Barack -- one of which has a "photo taken" time-stamp just two minutes before the article and accompanying image was posted on the left-wing Daily Kos blog. [Link]

This guy gives crackpot conspiracy theorists a bad name. The Daily Kos post is dated "Thu Jun 12, 2008 at 08:44:37 AM PDT," but the first comment on the post was left at "08:10:34 AM PDT"—some 32 minutes before the image was posted to Photobucket. Our friend in Israel neglected to notice that Kos "bumped" the post to the top of the main page by changing the time.

That said, I haven't yet heard Obama deny that he was born at the South Pole. Is he embarrassed of his Antarctic heritage?

Unstable Bacon Should Not Be Trusted

There's an old joke that the plays of William Shakespeare were not written by him, but by someone else of the same name. The notion that Shakespeare was not the author of the works attributed to him originated in a log cabin in Tallmadge, Ohio.

The story begins, a little unexpectedly, with an odd and frankly unlikely American woman named Delia Bacon. Bacon was born in 1811 in the frontier country of Ohio, into a large family and a small log cabin.

Delia was bright and apparently very pretty but not terribly stable.

Gradually, for reasons that are not clear, she became convinced that Francis Bacon, her distinguished namesake, was the true author of the works of William Shakespeare. Though she had no known genealogical connection to Francis Bacon, the correspondence of names was almost certainly more than coincidental.

In 1852 she travelled to England and embarked on a long and fixated quest to prove William Shakespeare a fraud. [Link]

A Viking-Inca Link?

The Vikings were great seafarers, but could they have traveled all the way to Peru and brought back an Inca? Archaeologists pulled up some rose bushes at the old St. Nicolas church in Sarpsborg, Norway, and came upon an unusual skull.

"A particular bone at the back of the head was not fused. This is an inherited trait found almost exclusively among the Incas of Peru," [Mona Beate] Buckholm added. To this day, no other example of this trait has been found in Norway. "While it is tempting to speculate, seeing as St. Nicolas is the patron saint of sailors, it's hard to imagine a Peruvian making his way here at the time. This is quite puzzling." [Link]