Man killed and eaten by his pets.

Do not mess with this guy's car. After it was hit by tomatoes, he came back to the spot with his shotgun and killed one of the alleged tomator throwers. Anger management problems?

New dig hopes to find out more about the Lost Colony at Roanoke. This was the group of settlers in the late 1500s who were plagued by hostile Indians and a lack of supplies. When English ships returned to find them, the colony was gone and the only clue was the word "Croatoan," which may or may not have been a reference to a friendly group of Indians on the island. The colony members were never heard from again.

In Boston, the Photographic Resource Center is putting on an exhibition called Concerning the Spiritual in Photography. It's a collection of "spirit photographs," pictures of ghosts in other words.

In Bahrain, dolphins are being used to patrol boats and to find mines. It reminds me of the science fiction story "A Deeper Sea" by Alexander Jablokov, in which dolphins were inadvertently tortured into doing what the military wanted.

Remember "Chippy," the sea lion who was found wandering miles away from the sea? After removing a bullet from his head and weeks of rehab, Chippy is being put back into the wild today.

Ancient crustacean is smarter than scientists originally thought. Actually, the only reason I'm linking to this is because the creature's scientific name is Godzilliognomus frondosus. Godzilla reference?

Only about 7 percent of adult Internet users have a blog. (Note: adult users.) And of those, only about 10 percent update them daily. So apparently, I'm a rarity among rarities (others might say I'm a freak). Cool.
(Link found at Shaken and Stirred.)

Charlize Theron may play the lead in 'Aeon Flux,' the movie based on the animated character. Aeon Flux was a cool looking, but somewhat incoherent, story of a female assassin in a future world. I always liked her better during the days of "Liquid Television" than later when she got her own series. The early vignettes had no voice acting, so the bizarre twisty plots didn't seem to matter much.

The 50th anniversary Godzilla film has been announced. Godzilla will face off against 10 monsters including Mothra and something called Monster X (there was a Monster X in a Gamera film, but I don't think this will be the same monster.) The film is being directed by Ryuhei Kitamura, director of Versus. It looks like after this film, there will be a 5 to 10 year break before another Godzilla film appears.

Robert Silverberg is getting the 2004 Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master award from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Silverberg deserves it. He's written about a gazillion books and more than half (what's half a gazillon?) are classics. A personal favorite: Dying Inside.

"Video games can make children fat and, in the case of violent games popular among teenage and younger boys, aggressive and even criminal, Swedish experts say."
You know, I don't see any proof of this in the article. This "expert" just seems to make the statement for a documentary (which I'm sure he has no financial involvement in.) Maybe there is something to the fat part, just as there would be if you studied kids who watched TV all day. But violence? You know, those kids who play sports are never violent, never hurt anybody. Sports has such a calming influence. Just ask Coach Bobby Knight.

Here's an interesting story asking the question: Are squid vicious? (Site may require registration.) Specifically, he's talking about the Humboldt squid, the "Arnold Schwarzenegger of the squids." Large numbers of these squid have taken over in the Sea of Cortes. Here's part of the story:

"At one point, as Kerstitch was underwater, a passenger stood on the deck fighting a 12-foot thresher shark with rod and reel. At about 30 feet, Kerstitch caught a glimpse of the shark -- and of a large squid flinging itself at the struggling predator.
"The squid quickly dashed away but not before removing 'an orange-sized chunk of flesh from the side of the shark's head with its powerful beak,' Kerstitch told me not long after the encounter. Other squid then turned on the diver. One latched onto his fin and pulled him down. Curious, Kerstitch let it pull, which may have provided this sense of opportunity.
"Kerstitch kicked and the first squid let go. But another attached itself just above his shoulders. 'It was like somebody was throwing a cactus on my neck,' he recalled.
"He struck the animal with his dive light and it let go, taking a gold chain he had been wearing. Another squid then wrapped its arms and tentacles around his face and chest. He buried his fingers into the body of the squid and began to pull. It slid to his waist and let go, taking his decompression meter.
"Kerstitch escaped and flopped back onto the boat, glad to be alive but burning with nasty lesions. 'These could eat one of us in a New York second, if that's what they wanted,' says Roger Hanlon, senior scientist at Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass. 'Two gnashes of that beak and your wrist could be gone.'"

The tensions on the India-Pakistan border are bad enough, do we really need UFOs flying back and forth?

Archaeologists are looking into the Tuscan sword in the stone. This sword is associated with a vain knight who is given a vision and becomes an hermit. Here's part of the story:
"There, another vision told him to renounce material things. Galgano objected that it would be as difficult as splitting a rock with a sword. To prove his point, he struck a stone with his sword. Instead of breaking, the sword slid like butter into the rock. Galgano once again became a recluse, isolating himself by the sword's side. There he remained until he died in 1181."
Some believe the story is old enough to have influenced the King Arthur legends of Excalibur.

Isn't Bigfoot a northwestern USA phenomenon? So what's up with this hunter claiming he sees Bigfoot in Levittown, Pa.? There is a picture of a pair of really unconvincing Bigfoot prints at that link.

Virginia company banking on underwater robots. Which gets me thinking. We have robot ships that float through the solar system, taking pictures of Jupiter and Saturn and so on. Why don't we have any automated ships to search the bottom of the ocean, to get pictures of the Marinas Trench and all the weird animals down there? Is it because there's no national agency, like NASA, to take control of that?

Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Alien 4, will be writing X-Men comic books.
(Link found at Bookslut.)

An instant just became shorter.
"Researchers in Austria and Germany measured the smallest time interval recorded, and found it lasted a ten million billionth of a second.
"It's about ten times shorter than the previous shortest measured interval, which lasted about one femtosecond or a million billionth of a second."

Debate rages over whether the Vinland map, which predates Columbus and indicates a land to the west, is a fake or the real deal.