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If this is true, then it’s got to be the find of the century: Searching for Bigfoot has released some teaser photographs of what they claim is the remains of Bigfoot in northern Georgia:
*The creature is seven feet seven inches tall.
*It weighs over five hundred pounds.
*The creature looks like it is part human and part ape-like.
*It is male.
*It has reddish hair and blackish-grey eyes.
*It has two arms and two legs, and five fingers on each hand and five toes on each foot.
*The feet are flat and similar to human feet.
*Its footprint is sixteen and three-quarters inches long and five and three-quarters inches wide at the heel.
*From the palm of the hand to the tip of the middle finger, its hands are eleven and three-quarters inches long and six and one-quarter inches wide.
*The creatures walk upright. (Several of them were sighted on the same
day that the body was found.)
*The teeth are more human-like than ape-like.
The creature was found by Matthew Whitton and Rick Dyer, who are keeping the exact location a secret to protect the creatures (yes, supposedly there were live ones other than just the one dead body). Tom Biscardi of Searching for Bigfoot is supposed to present DNA and photographic evidence of the find on Friday August 15, 2008.
Links: Searching For Bigfoot – via The Snitch and The Anomalist
(Note: scientists are skeptical, noting that Biscardi had similar claims before that turned out to be a hoax
Loren Coleman of Cryptomundo wrote "I feel, in all honesty, this, indeed, may be the real deal, and I say this from visual information that has been shared with me." Cryptomundo’s supposed to have the first photos of the creature, but the blog has been down most of the day).
Forget Congress, the White House, or that pesky economic princple of supply and demand … the recent drop in gas prices at the pump is the direct result of a higher authority: God.
That’s what Rocky Twyman, founder of the Pray at the Pump movement, claimed:
To solve the problem, Twyman isn’t begging the Lord for any specific act of intervention. He is not asking God to make OPEC pump more oil. Nor is he praying for all the speculative investors to be purged from the New York Mercantile Exchange, where crude oil is traded.
Instead, he says anyone who wants to follow his example should keep it simple.
"God, deliver us from these high gas prices," Twyman said. "That’s all they have to say."
Consumer advocates who have been howling about gasoline prices for months say they understand his frustration, even if they haven’t tried his tactics.
"Given the complete inertia and silence of this White House on a crisis that has people feeling just hopeless, prayer is probably as good as anything," said Judy Dugan, research director with the nonprofit group Consumer Watchdog. "Frankly, I wish them luck."
Link – via Surfing the Apocalypse
(Photo: Paul Chinn/SF Chronicle)
It’s hard to believe but there was a time in the United States (1837 – 1863, also known as the Free Banking Era or Wildcat Banking) when there was no central bank and paper money were issued by a variety of private banks.
Unenumerated Blog has a neat collection of bank notes from this freewheeling era of banking:
During this era the U.S. had no central bank and paper money was issued by a variety of private banks. Some was even issued by manufacturing and retail companies. This money was backed by gold, silver, real estate, stocks, bonds, and a wide variety of other assets. You can no longer cash them in, but they are now worth often substantial sums as collectibles. As you can see below, the note designs were more varied and creative than modern money, and were remarkably free of politicians’ faces.
Link – via The Home Page of J. Orlin Grabbe
If you’ve eaten at the Burger King on Orange Street in Xenia, Ohio, you were served by some really, really clean workers. Why are they clean? Because they’ve been taking bubble baths in the store sink!
A four-minute video posted on MySpace.com captured the employee, self-described as Mr. Unstable, bathing nude in a large stainless steel sink as several other employees and a store manager looked on.
The video began making its rounds on the Internet Monday morning. One of the recipients was Greene County Health Commissioner, Mark McDonnell. "My first thought was oh my God," said McDonnell.
McDonnell immediately sent staff to restaurant to investigate the numerous health code violations. He said the restaurant was aware of the incident and had already taken steps to clean up, including disposing of all the utensils and sanitizing the sink twice.
All of the employees involved were fired.
WDTN Dayton Ohio Weather and News has the story: Link – via Cynical-C
Forget the beef tongue ice cream, the weirdest thing you can eat or drink is this: Unagi Nobori [Surging Eel] from Japan.
No, it’s not an eel flavored drink. It IS eel!
Real estate is bad where I live, but apparently it’s just peaches when compared to Detroit. So, how bad is real estate in the Motor City? So bad that banks were selling foreclosed homes for $1 … and it took 17 days to find a buyer!
The home, at 8111 Traverse Street, a few blocks from Detroit City Airport, was the nicest house on the block when it sold for $65,000 in November 2006, said neighbor Carl Upshaw. But the home was foreclosed last summer, and it wasn’t long until "the vultures closed in," Upshaw said. "The siding was the first to go. Then they took the fence. Then they broke in and took everything else."
The company hired to manage the home and sell it, the Bearing Group, boarded up the home only to find the boards stolen and used to board up another abandoned home nearby.
Scrappers tore out the copper plumbing, the furnace and the light fixtures, taking everything of value, including the kitchen sink. [...]
So desperate was the bank owner of 8111 Traverse Street to unload the property that it agreed to pay $2,500 in sales commission and another $1,000 bonus for closing the $1 sale; the bank also will pay $500 of the buyer’s closing costs. Throw in back taxes and a water bill, and unloading the house will cost the bank about $10,000. [...]
And I love the last part here:
Colpaert declined to provide the name of the prospective purchaser, because the deal had not been through closing. The agent did say that the buyer agreed to pay the full list price of $1, and planned to pay cash.
Link – via J-Walk Blog
To celebrate its AdWords advertising program, Google sent long-time sent advertisers a little gift: Google apron and cookbook! Cookbook? From Google? Yep!
John Dickman, Google’s Global Food Manager wrote in the intro:
"This special cookbook represents some of our chefs’ best and favorite creations – the kinds of dishes they prepare for their friends and family. There’s a little bit of love here for every taste: from Crab Cakes with Cajun Remoulade, to savory Skillet Arugula with Nutmeg, to "Colonel Wade’s" Fried Chicken and those amazing Cheeky Monkey Mudslide Cookies.
This is a limited-edition collection. We send it to you with our unlimited thanks for your loyal support of AdWords. We hope these dishes will give you a small taste of how much we value your business."
Well, without any further ado, here are the snapshots of the Google Apron and Cookbook:
The EcoJohn incinerating toilet uses no water at all!
The EcoJohn Sr. is a waterless, incinerating toilet certified for safety by Underwriters Laboratories, which, for classification purposes, called it a barbecue.
“Toilets haven’t really changed for the past 100 years,” Stefan Johansson said. “People are always looking for better products, better solutions. The EcoJohns are better, cleaner and good for the environment.”
The unit can be installed at a site as a primary toilet or carted via trailers and used as portable toilets.
The toilets, one of several waste disposal products offered by the company, operate pretty much like the units found in homes across America today. But while those toilets use water to carry waste away, the EcoJohn Sr. is equipped with a propane-fueled burner.
After a user does his business, he closes the lid and a large, screw-like auger turns and carries the waste to the burn chamber where the propane burner then bakes urine, feces and paper into ashes.
The EcoJohn is useful for places where it is impractical to install a sewage system, such as vacation cabins, rooftop parties, and construction sites. But the question in everyone’s mind is: why does it have to be classified as a barbecue?! Link -Thanks, Julie Anne!
(image credit: Mark Martinez/Orange County Register)
Photo: Henry Hadlow
It’s a time honored tradition on the Internet to call "’Shopped" on dubious photos that look like they’ve been photoshopped. But this time, it’s the other way around: In this piece, called "Tell a Lie," Central Saint Martins College of Art student Henry Hadlow uses only the camera and handmade graphics to mimic common photoshop effects!
Link – via deliberatepixel
When 61-year-old angler Peter Hodge learned that he had a terminal disease, he made a last wish that his remains be turned into … fish food!
The 61-year-old, from Puriton, near Bridgewater in Somerset said he wanted to swim with his favourite fish in the spot where he spent 40 happy years angling.
After his death last month he was cremated in a wicker fishing basket coffin, and his ashes were mingled with 30lb of fish food.
Mr Hodge’s widow Caroline and daughter Sally were the first to catapult balls of the bait into the River Huntspill to signal the start of an angling competition among Mr Hodge’s friends.
Mrs Hodge, 56, said: "Pete always said that when he died he wanted his ashes to be mixed in with groundbait. He wanted the fish to gobble him up so he could swim up and down the river after his death.
Patrick Biz of Geeks are Sexy blog has a neat post about the 10 must-read books about technology for geeks. Included are fares like iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It by Steve Wozniak and Gina Smith; The Google Story by David Vise and Mark Malseed; Does IT Matter? by Nicholas G. Carr and so on.
Some blogs present information in unusual ways. Jessica Hagy’s Indexed, for instance, cleverly boils down the truth into simple graphs on 3×5 index cards.
Add this to the list: Where It Stands, where conventional wisdom is presented as scales between two opposing values. Here’s a sample post:
Ford announced today it was shifting focus to making more small cars. I don’t know about you but this news feels like 1981 all over again. That was when Ford first felt the crush of smaller, Japanese cars. A strategy they abandoned once they realized they could make big SUVs again. My guess is in another 15 years they’ll make the same announcement.
Check it out: Link
Buying a new car? Boing Boing has a clip from Ignite Seattle, where Rob Gruhl (who probably happens to be the only guy in the world that loves buying new cars – besides my good friend Joe – some people are weird that way) offers advice on how not to get ripped off: Link
Photo: TAS
Is that a spout in the middle of a mountain? Actually, yes it is. Pruned blog has a neat article about Gazex, an anti-avalanche system that uses explosive gas to trigger controlled (smaller) avalanches to avoid the big fatal ones:
From a distance, they look like disembodied talons jutting out from the rockface, ready to prick at imminent disasters. With their array of remote sensors, they are constantly reading the landscape; the mountains are kept under constant surveillance, lest they want to endanger quaint Alpine hamlets and new luxury ski resort developments above Denver or lose skiers to the wintry wilds.
When an avalanche is deemed likely, it detonates a mixture of oxygen and propane gas in its explosion chamber. The resulting hot gas is then directed downwards to the zone at risk.
Link | Gazex website - via Picdit
(Links open in a new browser window/tab)
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Can You Spot the Ninjas? |
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Incredible Buggy Landing Darwin will get you yet: Link |
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Secret Airplane Seats |
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Nightfall Link (~11 min long, fun space battle scene starts @ 3 min mark) |
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What in the World is This Kid Drawing? The twist at the end is pretty neat: Link |
For more the web's most interesting videos, check out: VideoSift.
Emily Spivack began the blog Sentimental Value to preserve some of the more interesting stories that accompany clothing for sale on eBay. For example:
I just loved this dress. But the size that was on clearance was a small. Did I mention I’m not a small? Yeah, so I figured I’d just lose some weight and be a small, right? Ladies? Sound familiar? Can I get an Amen from the choir? Yeah, so I never wore it.
Some stories are funny, some are heartbreaking, and some make you doubt their truth. Link -Thanks, Jan!
Telemegaphone Dale stands seven metres tall on top of the Bergskletten mountain overlooking the idyllic Dalsfjord in Western Norway.
When you dial the Telemegaphone’s phone number the sound of your voice is projected out across the fjord, the valley and the village of Dale below.
There are no worries about an electrical outage, since the device is powered by wind. Only time will tell if the residents of Dale and the surrounding valley will put up with calls coming in from all time zones. Link -Thanks, Sid Morrison!
(image credit: Magnus Torstensson)
Japanese police say 20-year-old Masayuki Ishikawa was on a Tokyo street corner after midnight when he objected to strangers who stared at him. They were staring at him because he was wearing a Winnie-the-Pooh costume, accompanied by two other people dressed as a panther and a mouse.
Ishikawa and his friends beat up the two victims and stole $160 (84 pounds) from them, the spokesman said, adding the group had apparently donned the unusual garb because they had run out of clean clothes.
(image credit: Disney)
