Robert J Turner

Just a littly thing ;-), it made my wife laugh, we were playing SpiderMan the Movie Demo on the PC and the camera angle somehow changed so that all we could see was Spiderman’s webbed crotch and the blue blue sky and he crawled arouund on the side of a building.

After several minutes of watching this wiggling webbed crotch we decided it was too much effort to try and get the camera angle to correct itself and also my wife was at the point of throwing up due to laughing so hard so we quit!

My wife commented that for a super hero it wasnt very super.

These guys make weird but very funny CGI Episodes, Check out The Strangehood which seems to have been made using something like the Sims, Also look at Red Vs Blue which I think was made using the Halo game, hey what do I know except that they make me laugh!

I have heard alot about podcasting in the last few months, seems to be a fairly new term for an old activity…:

Podcasting

Podcasting is a method of publishing sound files to the Internet, allowing users to subscribe to a feed and receive new audio files automatically. Podcasting is distinct from other types of audio content delivery because it uses the RSS 2.0 file format. This technique has enabled many producers to create self-published, syndicated radio shows.

Users subscribe to podcasts using ‘podcatching’ software (also called ‘aggregator’ software) which periodically checks for and downloads new content. It can then sync the content to the user’s portable music player, hence the portmanteau of Apple’s ‘iPod’ and ‘broadcasting’. Podcasting does not require an iPod; any digital audio player or computer with the appropriate software can play podcasts.”

OGOPOGO, CANADIAN LAKE MONSTER

by Mark Chorvinsky

There are a number of similarities between Lake Okanagan in British Columbia and Scotland’s Loch Ness. They are both long and narrow and lie at about the same latitude. And they are each famous for their resident monsters.

The best-known Canadian lake Monster, Ogopogo, actually made its media debut long before the Loch Ness Monster. In 1926, seven years before Nessie’s came to the public’s attention, Roy W. Brown, editor of the Vancouver Sun, wrote, ” Too many reputable people have seen [the monster] to ignore the seriousness of actual facts.”

While there are serious questions about whether there are non-retroactive Nessie sightings before 1930, but there are archival records of Ogopogo’s existence going back to 1872 and sightings have been reported regularly up to the present.

The creature is most often described as being one to two feet in diameter with a length of 15 to 20 feet. The head has been described variously as being horse or goat-like. One oft-mentioned characteristic of the monster is its resemblance to a log.

Cryptozoologist Roy P. Mackal believes that there is a “small population of aquatic fish-eating animals residing in Lake Okanagan.” Mackal initially assumed that the type of animal in Lake Okanagan was the same creature that he believed is in Loch Ness, but after a careful examination of the available data, he determined that the creature must be a form of primitive whale, Basilosaurus cetoides. “The general appearance of Basilosaurus tallies almost exactly with the loglike descriptions of the [Ogopogos]. Mackal spells out a detailed case for Ogopogo being a primitive whale in his book Searching for Hidden Animals.

Monster Island

There are good size Indian reserves in the Okanagan Valley. The Indians believe that small, barren Rattlesnake Island is the home of the Okanagan Lake Monster. Indians called the Okanagan Lake Monster N’ha-a-tik, and there are pictographs that some feel depict the monster near the headwaters of Powers Creek. Other native references to the Okanagan Lake Monster include the Chinook wicked one and “great-beast-on-the-lake.” In addition to the Salish N’ha-a-tik (or Na-ha-ha-itk), snake-in-the-lake was sometimes used.

The early inhabitants of the area saw the monster as a malevolent entity. Indians claimed that Monster Island’s rocky beaches were sometimes covered with the parts of animals that they had attacked and ravaged. When crossing the lake during bad weather, the Indians always carried a small animal that they would toss overboard in the middle of the lake to appease the monster, according to material in the files of the Kelowna Archives.

Primrose Upton, in The History of Okanagan Mission, noted that no Indians would fish near Squally Point. When Europeans settled in the area, they too feared the aquatic monster and supposedly continued the custom of offering an animal to appease Ogopogo. According to Ogopogo expert Arlene Gaal, armed settlers patrolled the shoreline in case of attack by the monster.

In 1914 a group of Nicola Valley and Westbank Indians discovered the decomposing body of an unidentified creature across from Rattlesnake Island. Five-six feet long and estimated to weigh 400 pounds, it was blue-grey. It had a tail and flippers, and an amateur naturalist in the area felt that it was a manatee. No one knew how such a creature could have gotten into the lake, and Lake monster expert Peter Costello has hypothesized that the carcass was “actually an Ogopogo, as the details of this mammal with flippers and a broad tail and dark color are all that we would expect. But the carcass was mangled so much that the long neck was already gone.”

Ogopogo footprints have also been found. Some have been irregularly shaped, others cup-like, some were like dinosaur tracks with three toes, and still others had a pad foot and eight toes! As Dr. Mackal has written, “The trouble with footprints is that anyone can fake them easily. Further, to assume that they were made by Naitaka is pure conjecture and supposition–certainly possible but without even a circumstantial link” to the few cases of Ogopogo land sightings that have been reported.

Music for a Monster

The name Ogopogo might suggest to some that it is an Indian word, but all evidence points to a modern origin. According to Mary Moon, author of Ogopogo: the Okanagan Mystery (1977), in 1924 a local named Bill Brimblecomb sang a song parodying a popular British music-hall tune at a Rotary Club luncheon in Vernon, a city in the northern Okanagan Valley. H.F. Beattie adapted the lyrics, which included the following:

I’m looking for the Ogopogo,

His mother was a mutton,

His father was a whale.

I’m going to put a little bit of salt on his tail.

Robert Columbo, in his book Mysterious Canada, notes that the Pogo Stick was a popular craze since its introduction in 1921 and this may have contributed to the name.

According to Arlene Gaal, author of Ogopogo: The True Story of the Okanagan Lake Million Dollar Monster, a Vancouver Province reporter named Ronald Kenvyn later parodied a popular British ditty and composed a song that included the following stanza:

His mother was an earwig;

His father was a whale;

A little bit of head And hardly any tail-

And Ogopogo was his name.

Thanks to these songs, the name Ogopogo stuck and the Indian name has been forgotten by all but monster buffs.

A History of Strong Sightings

While Ogopogo has never attained the fame of Nessie, the Loch Ness Monster, the creature of lake Okanagan has regularly caused quite a stir in the international press. Monster hunters from all over the world have been drawn to the area for research purposes, and many of the sightings have been as strong or stronger than those at Loch Ness. Multiple witness sightings of Ogopogo, so rare with many other controversial phenomena, have occurred on many occasions.

On September 16, 1926, Ogopogo was watched by some 30 cars of people along an Okanagan Mission beach. Not many monsters have been seen at one time by so many people. The Ogopogo sightings of 1925/26 deserve some in-depth study.

Consider the appearance of Ogopogo on July 2, 1947, when a number of boaters saw the monster simultaneously. One of the witnesses, a Mr. Kray, described the animal as having “a long sinuous body, 30 feet in length, consisting of about five undulations, apparently separated from each other by about a two-foot space, in which that part of the undulations would have been underwater…There appeared to be a forked tail, of which only one-half came above the water. From time to time the whole thing submerged and came up again.”

On July 17, 1959, Mr. and Mrs. R. H. Miller and Mr. and Mrs. Pat Marten saw a tremendous creature with a snake-like head and a blunt nose swimming some 250 feet behind their motor boat on British Columbia’s Okanagan Lake. The group watched the unknown animal for over three minutes, after which it submerged.

Recent Interest

More recently, in the summer of 1989, hunting guide Ernie Giroux and his wife were standing on the banks of Okanagan Lake when a bizarre animal emerged from the otherwise placid waters. “It was about 15 feet long and swam real gracefully and fast,” Giroux told the press. The Girouxs claim to have see an animal with a round head “like a football;” at one point several feet of the creature’s neck and body came up out of the water. The Girouxs saw the monster at the same spot where, in July 1989, British Columbian car salesman Ken Chaplin took a video of a what he described as a snake-like creature about 15 feet long and dark green in color. This columnist has viewed the Chaplin video and feels that it was probably a beaver.

“I’ve seen a lot of animals swimming in the wild and what we saw that night was definitely not a beaver,” Ernie Giroux states emphatically.

Giroux is in good company. There have over 200 sightings by credible people including a priest, a sea captain, a surgeon, police officers, and so forth. The fact that the percipients are generally people of good repute is often mentioned in reports of sightings. Photos of Ogopogo are numerous and include the 1964 Parmenter photo; the 1976 Fletcher photo; the 1978, 1979 and 1981 Gaal photos, the 1981 Wachlin photo, the 1984 Svensson photograph.

There have now been half a dozen films and videos taken of an animate object in Lake Okanagan, but none of them are conclusive.

What would solve the Ogopogo enigma? Only the discovery of an actual beast or the carcass of one would admit these creatures into mainstream science. If Ogopogo exists, it is clearly an elusive creature. Ogopogo hunters have failed to come up with that piece of unimpeachable evidence that will prove to the world that the aquatic monster exists. Until that evidence is found, Canada’s premiere lake monster will remain a classic mystery.

A shorter version of this article originally appeared in Fate magazine, August 1989.

Toad No More

Many are puzzled by the mystery of the German exploding toads. In Hamburg’s Altona district, there is a place now known as “the pond of death.” Access has been sealed off, but investigations have been done there between 2:00 and 3:00 a.m. — prime time for amphibian explosions.

Werner Smolnik, a German conservationist, compared the situation to a sci fi film. Otto Horst, a veterinarian, commented to the AFP news agency that he has never observed the like. Vets and animal welfare workers described how perhaps a thousand amphibians died after their bodies swelled up, popped and scattered their innards. Footage of toad debris was telecast on Local 6 News (WKMG-TV) in Central Florida. It is not known if the cause could be a fungus (perhaps from foreign race horses), a virus, or even frightenings or attacks by predators. The pondwater in “the pond of death” is the same as for the rest of Hamburg, and no relevant virus or germ has yet been found in the toad carcasses. But a certain injury has been noticed.

Frank Mutschmann, a Berlin veterinarian who obtained specimens from the pond in Hamburg, thinks that crows are pecking out the toads’ livers. The crows obtain the livers and the toads’ normal defensive puffing-up leads to their doom because of the holes in their bodies.

Whatever the reason, the situation is spreading. Danish Radio revealed that exploding toads are to be found in Denmark. A pond in central Jutland has become home to the anomaly.

Sources:

HoustonChronicle.com, 4/28/05, http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/world/3159356

BBC News World Edition, 4/27/05, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4486247.stm

The Independent (Bangladesh), 4/26/05

Sydney Morning Herald, 4/25/05

Sky News, www.sky.com, 4/25/05

Local6.com, 4/25/05

By John Blau

Numerous groups, including several outspoken U.S. politicians, have been demanding for some time a separate Internet domain for pornography in a move to prevent sexually explicit content from landing on the screens of young Net users. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) took a big step Wednesday to meet that demand by approving a plan for pornographic Web sites to use new addresses that end with “.xxx.”

ICANN, the nonprofit organization that oversees technical matters related to the Internet, said it will begin negotiations with ICM Registry Inc. to resolve commercial and technical issues associated with operating the .xxx TLD (Top Level Domain).

The decision in favor of establishing a virtual red-light district for providers of pornographic content and their customers represents a U-turn for ICANN, which rejected ICM’s first application for the .xxx TLD in November 2000. Reasons for the objection are published in a document available on ICANN’s Web site: (http://www.icann.org/tlds/report/report-iiib1c-09nov00.htm).

ICANN, in Marina del Rey, California, was not immediately available for comment.

ICM argues on its Web site (http://www.icmregistry.com) that .xxx Web addresses will shield children from pornographic content more effectively by allowing families and others using filtering software to block access to sites ending with this suffix.

The International Foundation for Online Responsibility (IFOR) will sponsor .xxx., according to ICM Registry. The foundation is a Canadian nonprofit entity that will serve as the policy-making authority for the .xxx TLD. It is — and will remain — totally independent from ICM Registry, which is primarily funded by registration activities, the Internet registry company said.

The non-profit foundation will promote online child safety and campaign against child pornography. “This foundation will provide assistance through various online support organizations and the sponsoring of technology tools and education programs for parents,” ICM Registry states on its Web site. “The online adult entertainment industry wants to create an identifiable space with which its members can elect to associate themselves and wherein they can responsibly self-organize and create guidelines to promote credible self-regulation.”

ICM Registry, which is wholly owned by Chestermere Investments Ltd., will operate the registry. The company, according to its Web site, “is a financially stable and completely independent entity with no affiliation, current or historic, with the adult-entertainment industry.”

In 2000, U.S. senator Joe Lieberman joined several other U.S. politicians demanding ICANN to approve the .xxx TLD. In a paper available on the Web (http://www.copacommission.org/meetings/hearing1/lieberman.test.pdf), Lieberman wrote: “I think (the .xxx TLD) has a lot of merit, for rather than constricting the Net’s open architecture, it would capitalize on it to effectively shield children from pornography and it would do so without encroaching on the rights of adults to have access to protected speech.”

Posted June 2, 2005 03:56 PM

“EBay buys Shopping.com for $620 million

By James Niccolai

EBay Inc. has continued its acquisition spree by agreeing to buy comparison shopping site Shopping.com Inc. for about US$620 million in cash, the companies said Wednesday.

The move should benefit eBay’s sellers by giving them access to a new sales channel and a new set of buyers, while Shopping.com will be improved by the addition of eBay’s listings on its site, the companies said.

EBay is much larger than Shopping.com: It had annual revenue of $3.3 billion in 2004, and net income of $778.2 million. In the same year, Shopping.com made $99 million in revenue and net income of $12.2 million.

But Shopping.com has been adding customers at a faster clip, according to research company comScore Media Metrix. It attracted 22.6 million unique visitors in April, up 15 percent from the same month a year earlier, compared with 63.8 million for eBay, an increase of 6 percent over the same period.

EBay will pay $21 per share for all the outstanding shares of Shopping.com, the companies said. The deal will reduce eBay’s earnings per share for 2005 on the basis of generally accepted accounting principles, due to stock compensation charges and other factors.

The acquisition is expected to close in the third quarter, subject to the approval of regulators and Shopping.com shareholders.

The move continues something of a buying spree for eBay, which has been looking to grow its business and expand into new areas.

In December it agreed to buy property listings site Rent.com Inc. for $415 million, and a month before that it bought Holland’s top classifieds site, Marktplaats.nl, for $290 million. Earlier last year it acquired a 25-percent stake in Craigslist of San Francisco, beefing up its classifieds business.

Posted June 2, 2005 03:57 PM”

We all have those tough questions that we never get answer in life for, maybe you will get one here…

“The Answers To Tough Questions site provides a variety of answers to commonly asked questions covering numerous topics. By no means do we provide all the answers, but we do our best to provide you with biblically based answers to the questions you may be struggling with. We also hope to provide you with information that you can use to help others who are struggling to find answers to tough questions.”