Noah's Ark found, says team (and they even brought photos to prove it)

The World Net Daily site is getting slammed right now but here's part of the story that I was able to pull. Amazing... if true. The Ark has been "found" in about a dozen places stretching from Turkey to Afghanistan over the years, so I'm going to remain healthily skeptical until we know more for sure. But it's still fascinating to consider this might be the real thing:

A 14-man crew that included evangelical apologist Josh McDowell says it returned from a trek to a mountain in Iran with possible evidence of the remains of Noah's Ark.

The group, led by explorer Bob Cornuke, found an unusual object perched on a slope 13,120 feet above sea level.

Cornuke, president of the archeological Base Institute and a veteran of nearly 30 expeditions in search of Bible artifacts and locations, said he is cautiously, but enthusiastically, optimistic about the find...

...Also on the team were Barry Rand, former CEO of Avis; Boone Powell, former CEO of Baylor Medical Systems; and Arch Bonnema, president of Joshua Financial.

The team returned with video footage of a large black formation, about 400 feet long – the length of the ark, according to the Bible – that looks like rock but bears the image of hundreds of massive, wooden, hand-hewn beams.

Bonnema observed: "These beams not only look like petrified wood, they are so impressive that they look like real wood – this is an amazing discovery that may be the oldest shipwreck in recorded history."

The team said one piece of the blackened rock is "cut" at 90-degree angle.

Even more intriguing, they said, some of the wood-like rocks tested this week proved to be petrified wood.

It's noteworthy, they pointed out, that the Bible recounts Noah sealed his ark with pitch, a black substance.

When the retrieved pieces were cut open, a marine fossil was discovered. In the area around the object, the team found thousands of fossilized sea shells, and Cornuke brought back a one-inch thick rock slab replete with fossilized clams.

With the discovery of wood splinters and broken pottery at the remote 15,300-foot level, the team says it also found evidence that ancients considered it an important worship site for hundreds, if not thousands of years.

Cornuke became involved in the search for the ark after meeting Apollo 15 astronaut James Irwin, participating with him in several searches on Mount Ararat in Turkey, but with disappointing results.

Cornuke began looking elsewhere, after finding clues in the Bible such as Genesis 11's reference to descendants of Noah coming to the Mesopotamian valley from the east. Cornuke believes that would put the biblical mountains of Ararat somewhere in northern Iran.

He also points to ancient historians such as Nicholas of Damascus and Flavius Josephus who wrote, just before and after Christ, that timbers of the ark had survived in the higher mountains of present-day Iran.

Cornuke noted that during World War II, an American Army officer and road construction engineer in Iran named Ed Davis said he saw the ark on a high mountain in the country after being led there by Iranian friends. After the war, according to Cornuke, Davis passed a lie detector test affirming he saw timbers from an ark-like object.

Before his death, Davis gave Cornuke a map showing the way to the object.

"It was right where Ed said it was in his map," Cornuke said. "After seeing it from a distance, I thought it at first unimpressive, but once we stood on the object we were all amazed at how it looked just like a huge pile of black and brown stone beams."...

Awright, so you wanna see this thing for yourself, eh? Slam down with the mouse here for some pics of a curious ark-sized object. There's also another story about the find over at AOL News.

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TRANSFORMERS teaser unfolds online

In 2003,
the Beagle 2 Mars Rover
was launched

We were told it crashed

Its final transmission
was classified top secret

It was the only warning
we would ever get

The Official Transformers movie website has the first "teaser" for next summer's movie. It's very slow to download (and it's in Flash video format which I would have much preferred it be Quicktime) but it looks great when you finally get it. Reminds me a lot of the feel that Independence Day had going for it. So if you don't mind a 20-30 minute download time and you can't wait to see it attached to Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest next week, click on the link above.

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Want to watch this week's MONDAY NIGHT LIVE that I produced?

Click here to watch this week's Monday Night Live (in Windows Media format), the first that I produced... featuring Yours Truly as the voice of "Greta" from the Bulgarian Institute of Standards and Technology. Thanks to Richard Moore (AKA "BillyBobMan") for hosting it!

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Tonight's serving from Netflix: MOTHER, JUGS & SPEED

I've seen this movie a few times already (and first wrote about it several months ago) but it's so darned funny I just had to put it on the Netflix queue. So tonight Lisa and I watched Mother, Jugs & Speed, the 1976 flick starring Bill Cosby, Raquel Welch and Harvey Keitel as staff members of a private ambulance company that breaks all the rules ("Everything in this place is illegal" as Cosby's character Mother says at one point). This is one of the most hilarious movies ever made in my opinion, and also the darkest comedy that I think Bill Cosby has done at any point in his career. Lisa thought it was really good and it was fun to watch her reactions to some scenes, like the part where Murdoch insists on riding in the back of the rig with the female patient (not to mention the "out-of-control gurney" scene). I can't recommend Mother, Jugs & Speed highly enough if you're in the mood for a good comedy to watch on some summer evening.

Here's Mr. Fishbine's opening monologue from the movie. I crack up every time I hear this...

"I don’t have to tell you people times are tough. You read the papers. The country’s going to Hell. Now you take inflation, recession, welfare. There’s nothing we can do about that. But thanks to muggings, malnutrition, assassination, and disease, we got a chance to make a buck! I can see that some of you men must be shocked by that statement, but I didn’t write the rules of life myself, no sir! The cripple, the junkie, the wounded, and the dying. Society calls them all worthless. They’re not worthless. Not to us! To us each one is worth $42.50 plus 50 cents a mile, and let’s not forget it! When it comes to realizing that people in distress will jump into the first rig that shows up, well, then that’s when the drive and enthusiasm of you men will make the difference! But there’s another group out there, men... and I will not dignify the Unity Ambulance Company my mentioning its name, but they want our territory. Our sick! Your jobs! But we’re not gonna let them do it to us, are we men? You bet we’re not! No sir!"

(Jugs tells them they've got a call about a woman in labor)

"A woman in labor. What could be more eloquent than that? Well, it looks like life has it’s own little ways of summing up the situation, doesn’t it men? Gentlemen? The F&B Ambulance Company is rolling!"

By the way, I've heard from several people that this is definitely a must-see movie if you're involved in medical/rescue services. Who knows... maybe you'll relate to this movie somehow :-)

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Darth Larry reviews SUPERMAN RETURNS

Haven't seen it yet (wish I could have caught the 10 o'clock showings last night 'cept I had a shift at the station) but Darth Larry - my oftentimes filmgoing companion and all-around nice guy - has a great review of Superman Returns up on his blog, in a style that can only be called his own. Makes me want to see this movie that much more. I'm probably going to see it sometime in the next few days, with Lisa and maybe a few other friends. I got a feeling that this is the kind of epic best shared the first time with the people you know best. Anyhoo, expect my own review to pop up here sometime afterwards.

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SPIDER-MAN 3 teaser swings online

And we even get to see the symbiote (the black blob that becomes the black costume). Mash down here to watch this amazing trailer in Quicktime format.

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This will be a night long remembered...

I guess I've come full circle now. Or maybe just call it "karmic retribution" for all the calls that I used to make to this show. Years ago in high school a lot of us used to watch Monday Night Live on the local TV station. Some of us liked to call up and see if we could get away with prank calls (like the forever-infamous "laughing box" caller). I loved to call this show up and talk about serious stuff, but I will admit now to making a few joke calls every now and then. Well, tonight I was running Monday Night Live as, I guess you could say I was the producer. And I got to join in the fun with hosts Ken and Mark as the voice of "Greta", the lady from the Bulgarian Institute of Standards and Technology ("B.I.S.T."). I know, to a lot of people this all doesn't sound like much, but for me it was a big thing that was a lot of fun to do. Who would have thought all those years ago that I would someday be on the other end of the phone line. Ahhhh, good times!!

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New study: Adult immaturity is on the rise

An article on the Discovery Channel's website talks about a recent study which indicates that today's adults are increasingly loath to grow up...

Serious Study: Immaturity Levels Rising

Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News

June 23, 2006 —The adage "like a kid at heart" may be truer than we think, since new research is showing that grown-ups are more immature than ever.

Specifically, it seems a growing number of people are retaining the behaviors and attitudes associated with youth.

As a consequence, many older people simply never achieve mental adulthood, according to a leading expert on evolutionary psychiatry.

Among scientists, the phenomenon is called psychological neoteny.

Personally, I don't know of very many people who fit the description of "psychological neoteny".

Stay tuned for my next article: a review of the blockbuster hit Nintendo DS game New Super Mario Bros.

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WATCHMEN prepares to chew up and spit out another one

Zach Snyder is the latest filmmaker to be tapped to direct Watchmen, it's being announced today. He follows Terry Gilliam, Darren Aranofsky, Paul Greengrass and several others over the past two decades who've attempted to bring the Alan Moore graphic novel to the big screen. And like them, I'll wager it's only a matter of time before he throws his hands in the air in total surrender. I've already posted before (here and a longer rant here) that Watchmen is probably the one book of modern literature that is absolutely unfilmmable. The only way it could possibly work is, as has been suggested by many, adapt it into a twelve-part series for HBO. Give each chapter of the book a one-hour installment, and maybe then everything in this most dense of stories could be conveyed to the average viewer. But there's no way, no way at all, that Watchmen can be boiled down into a 2-3 hour movie and stay faithful to the original source material.

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Christian film flap shows farce of movie rating system

Facing The Giants, a film made by Baptist pastors in Georgia, is getting a PG rating from the Motion Pictures Association of America. That's not good enough, the filmmakers and others are saying: they want a more "family-friendly" G rating. The MPAA has received around 15,000 complaints so far about their decision to make Facing The Giants PG. Opponents say the movie is being unfairly targetted because of its religious themes.

There's two problems that I see here: one, the whole rating system is terrible. It's capriciousness in determining what is - and what isn't - suitable for the screen is legendary. Mostly it has to do with how it's not a system that's suited for determining the merits of an individual film at all, but rather an arbitrary determinant of how controversial a movie is likely to be. I imagine that if Facing The Giants does have a lot of Christian sentiment, that alone would raise the eyebrows of the judging board. Clearly, some other system is needed.

Now, the second: these Christians, and too many of us do this also, are giving the rating system way too much importance. I know of some Christian parents who won't let their children see any movies with a rating over a G. Okay, well does that automatically qualify the movie for family viewing? I've seen plenty of PG-rated movies that should have been rated R, or at least PG-13. And one R-rated movie in recent memory, The Passion of the Christ, had a very powerful Christian element to it. I'm not saying that little kids should be allowed to see that, but there are certainly enough adolescents and up who could readily comprehend that movie... and maybe be affected by it in a positive way on some level. As it is, I know that some Christian pastors literally begged their congregations to "go see this R-rated movie!"

We as Christians are supposed to adhere to another measure than that imposed by the world around us. When we let something like a "PG rating" get under our skin, it's saying to the world that it has a power over us, when instead we are supposed to be free from its grasp.

Long story short: Christians should start thinking for themselves more, instead of letting others - like the Motion Picture Association of America - think for them.

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More thoughts on last week's visit from the Westboro Baptist mob

Adam Feldman posts some good thoughts about last week's picket of the Southern Baptist Convention by the Westboro Baptist Church (here's the link to my earlier report on their visit to our TV station). I like this part of Adam's essay especially...

For the record: What you see is what happens when truth is presented half-way. For instance, Scripture (Old and New Testaments) clearly teach that homosexuality is a sin--along with gluttony, pride, anger, malice, idolatry, adultery, disobeying parents, drunkenness, orgies, witchcraft and a host of other things. However, no where does it indicate that man can pass judgment or condemn a fellow man... this is reserved for God alone. Likewise, Scripture clearly teaches that all have sinned--not just homosexuals--and that everyone (yes, everyone) is deserving of eternal separation from God as a result (i.e. Hell). However, Scripture also teaches that God in his loving mercy and grace has provided forgiveness of sin and redemption from sinful behavior through his Son, Jesus Christ.

Amen, bruddah!

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Superhero Sand Volleyball

Credit goes to "Weird" Ed for finding this...

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The mighty Amiga 2000 and Video Toaster 3.1 combo

Last night our TV station had a telethon to raise money for a local charity. As the evening progressed a graphic on the screen kept a running score on how much money had been raised. And so it was that I got my first up-close look at a Commodore Amiga 2000 loaded with a Video Toaster board. This morning during a slow period I let myself play around with it some. And all I gotta say is: it ain't too bad at all... for a computer that's twenty years old!Once upon a time (and I feel old just from remembering it so well) there was a computer company called Commodore. It was one of several firms making computers for the home user back in the early 1980s, and there were others like Tandy, Texas Instruments, Apple, Atari, Coleco (okay how many people reading this will remember the Adam?), and probably the most well-known of them was Commodore. It had models like the Vic-20 and the Commodore 64. One thing you gotta remember though: none of these systems were compatible with the others. Which was the main reason why they all started falling out of favor as the IBM clones began taking over (the only exception of course being Apple).

Well, toward the later end of what was a remarkable run in the home computer market, Commodore rolled out the Amiga: maybe the first serious multimedia platform anywhere. There were a few models available for various-sized budgets, but the high-end system was the Amiga 2000. It boasted what was then a whopping 512 K of RAM, which depending on release version it was it could go all the way up to (back in the day anyway) an inconceivably huge 9 MB of memory. The processor speed was 7.14 mHz. And the way the entire system was clocked to run... well, let's just say it lent itself toward some astounding applications.

In 1990, Brad Carvey (brother of Dana Carvey of Saturday Night Live fame, and the inspiration for "Wayne's World" character Garth), Tim Jenison and a few other engineers at a company called NewTek rolled out the Video Toaster. And the Amiga 2000's full capabilities were at last unleashed...

The Video Toaster was a hardware/software combo that took advantage of how well the Amiga was synced to television signals. The hardware was a plug-in board with several video inputs and outputs. Among the things included with the software was a 3-D rendering engine... something quite revolutionary for a personal computer at the time.

The Amiga 2000, loaded with a Video Toaster, could create a virtually limitless number of titles, graphics, wipes, and other visual elements for real time television production. As a result, hundreds of smaller TV stations (and many visual artists) were able to do with approximately $5000 - the cost of an Amiga and a Video Toaster - what the big network affiliates in town were doing with equipment costing $50,000 and up. Probably the most impressive thing that the Amiga/Video Toaster combo did was rendering the special effects for the pilot movie and first few seasons of the television series Babylon 5, which called into service an entire render farm of networked-together Amigas loaded with Video Toasters.

There's no telling how many Amiga 2000s and Video Toasters wound up being put to work out there. And amazingly enough a few of them - like the setup at our station - are still being used, now almost a decade and a half after acquiring the equipment (the Video Toaster we're using is version 3.1, released in 1993).

NewTek is still making Video Toaster these days, but it's now a plug-in board/software suite for Windows-based machines. No doubt the latest versions are much more robust and slick than the original Amiga versions and certainly faster: it took our system about fifteen seconds to update the dollar amount last night as the pledges came in. But, it still works and gets the job done. And in the end, isn't that the real measure of how good a computer is, no matter how antiquated it may seem? Does it do what it's intended and does it do it fairly well?

In a cyber-driven society that's gone mad with upgrading to the latest model, our station's humble little Amiga 2000 and Video Toaster 3.1 are a nice reminder to me that older technology still has qualities that merit some appreciation. If for no other reason than because they helped pave the way for all the things that we can do with the latest innovations. But it's still nice to know that against the more modern tech, a 20 year old computer and an early Nineties circuit board are still holding their own.

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TERRIBLE new episode of DOCTOR WHO this past weekend

No, not talking about the Christopher Eccleston season that's been running on Sci-Fi Channel. I'm referring to the new series that's been airing on the BBC in Great Britain, which is getting bootlegged to this side of the pond over the Internet by those jolly good English chaps.

Saturday night I downloaded and watched "Love & Monsters" a few hours after it premiered there. And ever since it's been like a splinter in my mind, driving me mad. You know how some things you can't "unsee" after you've seen them? Well, that's what "Love & Monsters" is.

I've raved a lot about how good this new Doctor Who series has been: the Eccleston episodes and now David Tennant's turn as the Doctor: episodes like "The Girl in the Fireplace", "The Age of Steel" and then "The Impossible Planet"/"The Satan Pit" two-parter. All excellent work. Like that guy in Big Trouble in Little China: "I've got a really positive feeling about this."

And then comes "Love & Monsters".

This could have been a brilliant episode. I keep thinking this might have been to Doctor Who what "Jose Chung's From Outer Space" was to The X-Files (or what the other Jose Chung episode was to Millennium).

I can accept the "Scooby-Doo" antics at the beginning, and the L.I.N.D.A. group, and the off-kilter way how this episode was presented: as a perspective from the average "man on the street" who witnesses all these events of the Doctor's adventures. I can even accept the Absorbalof as a unique creature in the Doctor Who bestiary.

What I can not accept is the horrible, horrible ending: something is lost from the Doctor's character when he "rescues" a woman by trapping her disembodied head - that will never die - in a slab of pavement so she can be used for oral sex by her boyfriend.

This episode was vile and disgusting... a real shame 'cuz it had so much promise. If the BBC was smart it would make "Love & Monsters" one of those legendary "lost" Doctor Who episodes that forevermore only exists in the memory of whoever got conned into watching it.

Maybe there's some redeeming quality about this episode that I'm missing. Maybe someone will tell me where that is. But as it is, "Love & Monsters" has the dubious honor of being the first Doctor Who episode to get wiped off my hard drive. There's three more episodes this season: hope they're better than this dreck was. But as far as I'm concerned, I'm going to just forget that "Love & Monsters" ever happened. This is some kind of sick twisted fevered delusion that doesn't belong at all in the Who canon.

(Besides, if you ask me there's no way the Sonic Screwdriver could pull off a trick like that.)

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Why Brando in SUPERMAN RETURNS will be remembered

Ain't It Cool News has a terrific exclusive about how special-effects house Rhythm & Hues was able to take footage of Marlon Brando that was shot for 1978's Superman: The Movie and incorporate it into Superman Returns, which'll be out next week. You can watch the rather hypnotic video of how they dunnit in either Quicktime or Windows Media format at the link. For some reason, watching this really makes me excited about seeing this movie in a way that hasn't hit me before...A month or so ago it was Brando returning in The Godfather videogame, and now this. Makes you wonder if a CGI-enhanced edition of Apocalypse Now is in the works, don't it? :-P

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My wife, the song parodist!

As another year of being a music teacher at her school was wrapping up, Lisa began undertaking something she's never done before: writing a song parody. And I must say, she did a pretty darned funny job with it! Click here for "Teacher's Favorite Things"!

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Want to save videos from YouTube and Google Video?

Then KeepVid is the site you need. Simply paste in the URL of the page at YouTube, Google Video or wherever else that your desired video is on, select which site it is from the drop-down menu and hit the "Download" button. In a few seconds KeepVid generates a clickable "save as..." link, which in the case of YouTube you'll need to add the .FLV extension to it and have a Flash video player like this one installed in order to watch it from your hard drive. I just tried this trick on the surreal-as-heck clip of Connie Chung singing and it works just fine (downloading the video that is, not Chung's crooning).

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