Armageddon Scheduled For September 29th

NCBuy Weird News has some news that might make you reconsider making any big plans this September 29th: it might be “the beginning of the end of the world.”

That’s the chilling news from E.T. expert Dr. Terry Johnson, who claims various conglomerations of alien races are conspiring to destroy planet Earth on that day – with the help of a few volcanoes and earthquakes.

Johnson says an earthquake is scheduled to take place in Guadalajara, Mexico, and when the “crest” of the quake happens, a giant spacecraft will slam into the fault line like a “kamikaze” fighter and start a global chain reaction that will result in the ultimate destruction of the planet.

He claims the E.T.s want to destroy Earth because, in his words, “They’re afraid of human creativity and our unique ways of problem solving.”

Some humans will be saved, and Johnson says many are already being abducted to other planets to be used as super computers.

It sounds hopeless, but he says hundreds of human abductees are working as a resistance force by learning to fly UFOs.

I, for one, welcome our new alien overlords and would like to remind them that I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves. Sorry, I couldn’t get away without making that Simpsons reference… 😉

Bawlamer Hyote

Looks like folks up ‘air near Bawlamer might’ve found themselves a new kind of critter. After spotting a “mystery animal” hanging out in his yard, a Baltimore County, Maryland man set up a motion detector and camera and took some grainy pictures of what locals have dubbed a “hyote,” part hyena and part coyote. Just thinking about the locals saying “hyote” in a Bawlameran accent is enough to make my day… 🙂

National Park Service Approves Creationist Publication

According to this story in Harper’s Magazine, the National Park Service (NPS) “approved the book [Grand Canyon: a Different View], which presents a creationist view of the formation of the Grand Canyon, for sale in park bookstores and gift shops.” The NPS should not be tacitly ensorsing publications that cite the Bible in explaining the formation of the Grand Canyon! Read the excerpts for yourself; this passage in particular makes me cringe every time I read it:

Fossils tell a story, but the story we “read” depends on the “glasses” we are wearing when we do the examination. If we wear our evolutionary glasses, we will get one story. But if we have on our biblical glasses, which allow us to see biblical truth, we will get a very different story.

It doesn’t get any better from there. Go ahead and peddle your pseudo-science if you want, but don’t expect public funds to support your religious crusade. And don’t even get me started about the “three bronze plaques bearing biblical verses [that] were reinstated to public viewing areas on the Canyon’s South Rim, despite advice from the Interior Department that such religious displays violate the First Amendment.” Religion is a private thing that should not be imposed on anyone, and these actions by a government agency boggle my mind…


As long as we’re on the subject…. Same Minolta Z2, same dragonfly, different photographer.


I couldn’t let Driko think he was the only one that photographed a dragonfly this week. Quite coincidentally I took this photo on 7/10/04. This big guy was hanging out on a vase on my patio table. Photo with my Canon S30 digital. Here is hoping this new bloggerbot thing works.  Posted by Hello

BloggerBot

We finally made the jump to digital photography, recently buying a [Konica] Minolta Z2 camera. I’m not abandoning my Canon film camera yet, just biding my time until I can afford one of their nice digital SLRs so I can keep using my lenses. In the meantime, the digital camera is ideal in certain situations, and I’ve been eager to share the pictures we’ve taken. Up until now, I hadn’t found a good way to share our digital photography online, but a recent acquisition by Google has just made things a lot easier.

Google recently bought Picasa, a very nice digital photo organization and manipilation program. You may recall that Google and Blogger merged last year, so the addition of Picasa has interesting implications for blogging. In addition to its digital photography organization software, Picasa offers Hello, a collaborative way to share digital photographs with family and friends. The synergistic result of the Google, Blogger, Picasa, and Hello combination is BloggerBot, a means to easily publish digital photographs in blogs. I’m sure I could have explained that better, but it’s still a little new to me as well. Below is my first post using BloggerBot, and I’m quite impressed with the result. I’m definitely going to be doing some experimenting with this, and I may be contacting some of my friends and family if I can get the Hello service working to my satisfaction.


Dragonflies love the antenna on my Jetta…

Field Guide To Sprawl

The Boston Globe has an interesting feature titled Sprawl, A To Z that depicts different terms and photographs from Dolores Hayden’s A Field Guide To Sprawl. From “snout houses” to “parsley on a pig,” browse through these examples of suburban development gone awry…

HULK’S DIARY

Check out HULK’S DIARY, with entries like:

Hulk saw movie about bug-man and it was good but needed more smashing.

AND HULK DID NOT GET SNIFFLY DURING ROMANTIC SCENES SO IF YOU HEAR IRON MAN OR THOR TALKING ABOUT IT THEY ARE LIARS.

Pretty funny… 🙂