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I'm coming to get you

Ben-Hur Pereira was having what you might call a devil of a time one day last week at an amusement park in Stockholm, where he portrays Satan in a house of horrors, when he stepped outside for a break. But within minutes folks were calling him an absolute angel. For some reason, he looked up in time to see a rider aboard the park's stalled Ferris wheel dangling high above the ground after having slid out of his seat. Reacting instinctively although still in full costume, Pereira climbed the superstructure, reached the rider, who was hanging on for dear life, and returned him safely to the seat.

In Britain, respondents to a new survey have ranked American cartoon character Homer Simpson's "D'oh!" as their favorite expression from a TV series. The exclamation won 34 percent of the vote. All others finishing in the top 10 came from British programming.

After five centuries, Michelangelo's sculpture "David" was due for a good cleaning. Now it has had one, and the restored masterpiece will go on public display in Italy in September. The controversial wet cleaning, which the first hired restorer refused to perform, took eight months to complete. Some experts worried that even the "minimalist intervention," which used distilled water applied through "mudpacks" of cellulose pulp, might harm the marble. Restorer Cinzia Parnigoni, however, says that the restored sculpture "is still itself, only what has changed is its luminosity." Some facts about the masterpiece, which depicts the naked biblical hero:

First unveiled: Sept. 8, 1504
Present location: Accademia Gallery, Florence, Italy
Number of visitors: 1.2 million annually
Material: A single block of marble
Height: 14 feet
Weight: More than 6 tons
Cost of restoration: $480,200
Charities paying for rehab: Friends of Florence and the Dutch foundation Ars Longa

- Associated Press/ Discovery Channel