This cat, named Socrates (more like Hippocrates, am I right? Never mind) is a really fat cat. After a recent checkup at the vet, he’s on a strict diet to get him from 22 lbs to 9.9 lbs in 100 days. His owner says he gets all grumpy now when he sees his new food bowl portions.
by Teresa Mears
Here's a small victory for consumers:
Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase are planning to overhaul their debit card programs, changing the way they credit transactions and allowing customers to opt out of overdraft protection.
We'd like to think they're doing it because that's what the customers want, but they might have been just a teeny bit influenced by moves in Congress to crack down on overdraft fees.
Members of Congress have used words like "criminal" and "rip-off" to describe the practice of letting people overspend and then charging them fees without warning, The Washington Post reported. Customers are outraged that banks have raised fees, even as the government is investing vast sums to rescue the industry.
"People out there are getting whacked," said Sen. Christopher Dodd, who is drafting legislation that would require banks to get permission from customers rather than doing automatic overdrafts. "They should have the right to say, 'Deny me the transaction.' "
Overdraft fees are big business for banks and are expected to yield more than $38 million this year.
Overdrawing your account by a small amount of money, spread over several transactions, can cost hundreds of dollars in overdraft fees.
Rather than refuse to process a debit transaction when the account is out of money, banks approve it and then charge a hefty fee, $16 to $35 per transaction. That means an outing with six transactions could cost $210 in overdraft fees, even if you spent only a few dollars more than the amount in your account.
You might figure you could save yourself from these fees by telling the bank you don't want it to approve any transactions if you're overdrawn. But many banks don't allow you to do that.
And T at Savvy Frugality even had a problem with the bank processing the debit transactions first, charging fees and only afterward processing a paycheck deposit, even if the paycheck deposit happened first. When T protested, the charges were reversed, but T is still looking for a new bank.
Beginning Oct. 19, Bank of America customers will be able to opt out of overdraft protection, and new customers will be asked whether they want overdraft protection when they open their accounts.
Chase also plans to allow customers opt out of overdraft coverage. Plus, the bank says it will now credit bank transactions chronologically rather than debiting the highest amount in a day first. So if you make six transactions and only the last one overdraws your account, you'll be hit with only one overdraft fee. Currently, banks often debit the largest transaction first, which causes more of the day's transactions to incur overdraft fees.
Bank of America says it won't charge fees for overdrawing an account by less than $10 in one day and will charge a maximum of four overdraft fees per day, at $35 per overdraft. Chase will no longer charge fees when accounts are overdrawn by less than $5 and will cap the number of overdraft fees a day to three.
No word yet on whether other banks plan to follow suit.
While you're waiting for the new rules to take effect, or if you're at a bank that won't allow you to opt out of overdraft protection, be vigilant to save yourself from those hefty fees. If you think you've been charged unfairly, ask for a refund. You may get it. And, Flexo at Consumerism Commentary has 10 tips for avoiding overdraft fees.
 Touchstone Pictures |
| Click for video: A lifelike face is installed on a robot in a scene from "Surrogates." Click on the image to watch a video about the trends behind the film. |
Bruce Willis' latest action movie takes place in a world where humans mostly stay behind closed doors and interact using lifelike cyber-substitutes. These robotic "surrogates" pass along all their sensations - during work, play and even sex - via virtual reality. In this wired-up world, you can be anybody you want to be through your surrogate: a healthier, younger version of yourself, or a super-athlete, or a supermodel. (Will that be male or female?)
So "Surrogates" is meant as pure science fiction, right? Wrong. The filmmakers and futurists behind the movie say they're aiming for an only slightly enhanced version of present-day trends.
"In the near future, robots are going to start to look like humans," said James Canton, founder of the San Francisco-based Institute for Global Futures. "I think within 10 years you're going to have the world of the surrogates."
You don't even have to wait 10 years to experience the kind of virtual life that eventually goes so wrong in "Surrogates," said the film's director, "Terminator 3" veteran Jonathan Mostow.
"Right now on the Internet you can go and you can shop, talk with your friends, get the news. You can express your opinion. You can pretty much live a full human life without ever leaving your home," Mostow told me.
Not that the movie is a Michael Moore-ish diatribe against the Twitterpated lives that many of us lead nowadays. Like most folks in Hollywood, Mostow recognizes that the film will not fly unless it's the entertaining, thrill-a-minute action ride theatergoers expect from a Bruce Willis movie. But he also means it to be something more.
"We do know just from the test audiences who have seen the movie that people are finding it very thought-provoking," Mostow said. "It's a little bit different from your typical Hollywood thriller."
How is it different? Here's an explanation from Canton, who helped out on the film project: " 'Surrogates' is clearly a near-future vision when you mash up nanotechnology, and of course computing, robotics and the advances in materials science. All these technologies are converging so quickly, and that convergence is what 'Surrogates' covers so well, without getting into the details."
If you want to delve into the real-life details, you can look at the research being conducted in Japan to create sociable robots suited to serve the country's aging population. More signs of change can be seen on far-off battlefields, where the military is using surrogates ranging from bomb-defusing robots to bomb-dropping drones.
Other trends include the rise of online worlds such as "Second Life," where users guide avatars through activities ranging from cyber-boinking to virtual commerce to the same headaches people experience in real life. Then there's the milieu created by Twitter, Facebook and other online networks. Researchers say the personal interactions on social-networking sites can be just as complicated - and occasionally just as boring - as real life.
Canton said he's already caught glimpses of the road ahead. Imagine, for instance, an extension of the force-feedback technology currently used to make video-game controllers shake and kick back in your hands. "I can tell you I've seen work in the labs that take force-feedback and make it totally sensory and cognitive," he told me.
Like his fellow futurist Ray Kurzweil, Canton believes the time is fast approaching when machines will be more intelligent than natural-born humans - part of a phenomenon that Kurzweil dubbed "the singularity." But Canton thinks the age of the surrogates - a society in which machines are used as extensions of human capabilities rather than self-actuating entities - will come well before the singularity.
Baby-boom demographics could accelerate the current trend, he said.
"It's likely that one of the key areas will be memory loss due to Alzheimer's," Canton told me. "Well before we have drugs to mediate memory loss, people will have both cloud-computing and wetware implants to help them with retrieving information. You're going to see this emerge much quicker, and it's going to be driven by baby boomers and baby-boomer economics."
Canton isn't saying that the approach of the singularity - or the surrogates - will be totally a good thing. In fact, that's what the movie is all about. He said the Bruce Willis character "is challenged by a world that has been so dominated by these surrogates that the level of authenticity and humanness has been modified or even mutated."
"That's the big challenge," he said. "There's a wonderful social message in this that I think audiences will find both interesting and provocative as well as entertaining."
That's certainly the way director Jonathan Mostow feels about the film.
It's not as if Mostow started out with a completely blank slate: The movie's screenplay is based on "The Surrogates," a graphic novel by Robert Venditti and Brett Weldele that came out in 2005. And that work, in turn, was inspired by "The Cybergypsies," a book about online addiction in the dial-up modem era. (Those two works, by the way, make a perfect dual selection for the Cosmic Log Used Book Club - a semi-regular listing of books on cosmic themes that have been around long enough to turn up at libraries and secondhand-book shops.)
Even though the concepts that gave rise to "Surrogates" go back a quarter-century, Mostow told me the movie includes a few twists that should give today's Twitterers, texters and Facebookers something to think about.
Here's an edited version of my Q&A with Mostow:
Cosmic Log: How does the vision behind this movie differ from the vision behind, say, "Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines," which you also directed?
Mostow: With "Terminator" and the tradition of science fiction that is about sentience - thinking robots - the core is that somehow we are surrendering control to the computers. That goes back a very long way. In the last 25 years you can think of the seminal movies on that theme - like "WarGames." You remember that movie? The "Terminator" franchise, which has been around for 20 years, is asking that same question: Isn’t it dangerous to surrender control to the machines, because look at what machines can do.
This movie asks a different question. The robots are not independently thinking robots. They’re simply tools. They’re sort of a physical manifestation of ourselves on the Internet. Right now on the Internet you can go and you can shop, talk with your friends, get the news. You can express your opinion. You can pretty much live a full human life without ever leaving your home.
Q: … And it can be a different life from the actual life that you’re leading offline. I suppose that in the movie, as in the graphic novel, you can have somebody sitting on the couch eating potato chips and pretending that he’s a beautiful woman at the club.
A: Yeah, absolutely. And that’s certainly one of the side effects, if you will, of what happens when we live that way. But the bigger question is really, in a world where we are seemingly more connected with each other than ever before, you could argue that were actually more disconnected from each other than ever before - because we’re actually, really not interacting with each other on a personal basis.
What does that do to people? How does it change society, and how does it change the people in it? Those are very different questions this movie is posing, as opposed to all the other robot movies that have come before it.
Q: Are there things that you or the actors brought from their own lives? I think a lot of the people in Hollywood today are pretty savvy on this whole idea of mediated online identity nowadays. When you were putting together the movie, could you draw upon real-life experiences in that area?
A: Yes. I think anybody who lives anywhere where you can be connected via the Internet has on some level a love-hate relationship with this technology.
Q: Any examples?
Director Jonathan Mostow works on "Surrogates."
A: For example, during the Christmas holiday before we started shooting, Bruce was on the beach in the Bahamas - and he had his BlackBerry, and he couldn’t stand the fact that even in the most remote, beautiful place on earth, he was getting e-mails, text messages and phone calls. He just took his BlackBerry and flung it out in the ocean. And he watched the glow of the screen as it sunk beneath the surface of the water - there was this great feeling that he had.
In fact, that’s sort of what Bruce does in the movie - not so much with a BlackBerry, but with his own connection to technology.
Q: Is there something that you’d like moviegoers to know as they walk into the theater - something to watch for that may not be obvious if you’re just looking for a fast-paced action thriller?
A: Well, I think that the movie is first and foremost entertainment, but what the movie hopefully also does is ask some questions. I hope it kicks off a conversation at the end of the movie, about taking a step back and looking at our relationship to technology. In fact, the inspiration for the author who wrote the graphic novel was a book about the addictive behavior of people on the Internet - people who simply could not pull themselves away from the computer. And this was in the mid-1990s. That seems like ancient history to us now, right?
Q: Right …
A: That was before Facebook, before Twitter, before all these social networking places. You had e-mail, and most of us were using dial-up modems. Even back then, people just couldn’t let go of it. So it’s interesting that the core of human behavior as far as technology goes hasn’t really changed.
[It was also interesting to listen to the recording of this Q&A and hear the blings, boings and tweets going off from the e-mail, instant-messaging and Tweetdeck software on my computer nearby - sounds that I had tuned out during the interview.]
Q: Was there any research into online identities that you personally drew upon when you were working on the film, or was it more a case of your informal research … just seeing how people use the Internet.
A: I think a lot of is … yeah, it's living life. If you have an online presence, if you use the Internet, you understand how these things work. And that will be taken from your own personal experience. If you use that as the basis for a movie, you’re much more likely to stumble upon the truth of something.
Q: Are there any technological innovations that are introduced in the movie that could help people see this in a different light? Any twists that play off what's happening in the Twittersphere?
A: Well, I don't want to give away any of the plot … but we do know just from the test audiences who have seen the movie that people are finding it very thought-provoking. It's a little bit different from your typical Hollywood thriller.
Q: That's fair. Can you say if working on this movie has changed the way that you or the other folks you worked with think about social networking? Are you trying to reduce the time you spend on the BlackBerry or the iPhone because of the work that you’ve done here?
A: That's a great question. I have to say that, when I'm on the computer now, I'm aware that I'm on the computer. I'm aware that that clock is ticking. I'm aware that for that time when I’m online, that’s time that I’m not spending offline. And so every hour that you're on the computer is an hour that you're not actually in real life, you’re not doing something for real.
When Ken Morrish picked this apple off a tree in his garden, he thought a prankster had painted half of it red.
But after inspecting it closely he realised that the remarkable split colours on the fruit were a natural phenomenon. And the bizarre apple turned Mr Morrish into something of a celebrity in his village with scores of neighbours queuing up to take a photograph of it.
Experts say that the odds of finding an apple with such a perfect line between the green and the red are more than 1million to one.
A fruit of two halves: This Golden Delicious apple seems to be having an identity crisis, split perfectly down the middle into red and green. Local horticulture experts are baffled by the specimen
But Mr Morrish, a retired painter and decorator who lives in Colaton Raleigh, near Sidmouth in Devon, has no plans to eat it.
Instead, he has stored it in his fridge so villagers can continue to come round and take photos.
'It looks as if a green apple and a red apple has been cut in half and stuck together,' he said. 'I couldn't believe my eyes. It's absolutely phenomenal.
The 72-year-old pensioner spotted the split-coloured fruit as he picked apples from a Golden Delicious tree in his garden.
One in a million: Ken Morrish could hardly believe his eyes when he saw the freaky fruit.
Horticulturists say the colourings on the apple are probably caused by a random genetic mutation.
In such cases, the red side usually tastes sweeter than the green side - because it has seen more sunshine during its growth.
'The red and green split through the stem is totally perfect - as if I've painted it. It's a genuine one-off and none of us have ever seen an apple like it before.'
Mr Morrish, a grandfather-of-two who has grown apples for 45 years, took the fruit to horticultural experts at a nearby college for closer examination.
'They took pictures of it and said they had never come across anything like it either,' he added. 'It's caused a real stir in the village. People have been coming round to see it and take photos of it.
'I'm sure a few hundred years ago it would have been seen as a supernatural sign or something. I don't know if it's worth a lot of money but I won't be letting it out of my sight.'
John Breach, chairman of the British Independent Fruit Growers Association, said: 'I've never seen this happen before to a Golden Delicious. It is extremely rare. It is an extreme mutation.
'There has been the occasional case of this type reported. If there was a whole branch of apples with the same colouring then fruit experts would get even more excited.'
Jim Arbury, fruit superintendent at RHS Garden Wisley in Surrey, said it was probably the 'result of a random genetic mutation'.
'This is known as a chimera where one of the first two cells has developed differently giving rise to one half of the apple being different,' he said.
'It is unlikely to be a stable mutation but it is worth checking next year to see if it recurs. There are instances of some striped apples and pears where the mutation remains stable including one striped pear in the collection at Wisley called Pysanka.'
It's a cause for controversy at home and has picked up a gamut of awards in the process, but now the popular cartoon show "Family Guy" has found itself caught in the middle of a spat between Venezuela and the United States about drug trafficking.
Venezuelan state TV today broadcast an excerpt from "Family Guy" as an example of how the U.S. promotes drug use. The clip features Stewie, the matricide-obsessed infant son of Peter and Lewis Lois Griffin, singing a song extolling the virtues of smoking weed.
"We can observe how [the U.S. government] promotes and incites the population to consume that drug there," said Tarek El Aissaimi, Venezuela's Interior Minister. "There's no subliminal message. It's an animated cartoon where you can observe perfectly how they promote consumption and moreover they foster the legalization of marijuana."
El Assaimi blames U.S. drug consumption for fueling drug trafficking in Latin America.
Venezuela took offense to a U.S. Congress report that concluded that Venezuela is undermining U.S. efforts to combat the drug trade in neighboring Colombia. Since then, El Aissaimi has been on a media blitz to prove how much effort the country is making to stamp out drug trafficking.
Watch the offending song here:
September 25th, 2009 by Lin Edwards 
Panasonic 3D Full HD truck
(PhysOrg.com) -- Sony and Panasonic have recently announced a new technology, called "active shutter" for producing the experience of 3D on high definition TVs. The first models are expected to be available in late 2009 or early 2010.
The original 3D experience of movies depended on the viewer wearing stereoscopic green and red glasses. The illusion of 3D in the image came from superimposed green and red images taken from slightly different angles. Each eye saw only one image, and the viewer's brain combined them to give the illusion of three dimensions. 3D movies using this technology, called anaglyph 3D, can be viewed on any TV, as long as the viewer wears the glasses.
Anaglyph 3D glasses. Image: Wikipedia.
The problem with anaglyph 3D is that it strains the eyes, and can cause headaches and nausea in some people. Others have a dominant eye, and find it difficult to see the image as three dimensional.A newer process for 3D in the cinema uses a special screen and polarized glasses. In this system images for the left and right eye are rapidly alternated, and the glasses pick up the appropriate image for each eye. A similar technique has now been introduced for high definition LCD televisions by the South Korean company LG Electronics and Japanese firm Hyundai. The system, known as X-Pol, projects the different images in the even and odd horizontal lines of the video, and the polarized glasses sort it all out for the viewer.
LG Electronics 47LH50 3D LCD TV
Now Sony and Panasonic have introduced an "active shutter" technique for high definition plasma and LCD TVs. The viewer still has to wear polarized glasses, but in this system the glasses have LCD active shutters that are synchronized with signals from the TV. The shutters rapidly block the right and left eye views alternately so each eye receives the correct image.The new system gives higher resolution than X-Pol because in active shutter technology each eye sees all the lines in the video, whereas in X-Pol each eye sees only half the lines.
Separate images for the left and right eyes are recorded with 1920 X 1080 full-HD quality and alternately played at high speed. By watching these images through special LCD glasses that are timed to open and close the right and left lenses in synchronization with the alternating images, the viewer is treated to exciting 3D realism. Image: Panasonic
Panasonic executive Peter Fannon said the new high definition 3D televisions will give viewers an experience just like being there, rather than watching it on TV.
Panasonic will be releasing some Full HD 3D models later this year, with Sony's version coming on the market later. Buyers of the new TVs will also need 3D-compatible Blu-ray disc players. The glasses will be supplied with the TV sets. There is no information yet on the prices of these televisions.
More information:
• Video: CES 2009: Panasonic 3D HD TV
• Video: CES 2009: Panasonic TVs and portable Blu-ray
• Video Commercial: Sony's first 3D Home TV's coming in 2010
• http://www.panasonic.com/3D/
A stark but stunning image of a damselfly in silhouette has landed its creator with the title of British Wildlife Photographer of the year.
The shot, of the insect clinging to a dew-flecked reed, won photographer Ross Hoddinott a prize of £5,000 in the inaugural British Wildlife Photography Awards.
It was competing against an array of dazzling images which included a flock of birds amassing above a service station canopy and a deer bathed in golden dawn light.
Compelling: The judges awarded photographer Ross Hoddinott first prize for his image of a damselfly silhouette
Judge Sue Herdman, editor of the National Trust Magazine, said of the winner's work: 'We were looking for a winning image that stood out as the most memorable and striking.
'Almost monochrome in tone, this beautiful silhouette is both intriguing and haunting, with a delicate composition and admirable clarity.
Lorne Gill took this image of birds circling above a petrol station called 'The ultimate flock' by Lorne Gill
Ben Hall won praise for his Fallow buck at dawn image
'Droplets of water shimmer on the wings; a fuzz of hairs bristle from the body and, perhaps most fascinating of all, the photographer has caught the "face" of our fly which holds, in profile, a curiously human look.
'No one viewing this photograph, we concluded, could fail to find it anything other than compelling.'
A photo of blackbirds fighting was taken by David Slater who won the wildlife behaviour category
Will Nicholls won the Young British Wildlife Photographer Under 18 award for his image of a red squirrel taken in Kielder Forest, Northumberland
The awards recognised the efforts of amateur and professional photographers.
A shot of a red squirrel peeping from behind a tree in Kielder Forest, Northumberland, landed 14-year-old Will Nicholls the under-18s award and a £500 prize.
A grey seal was captured through the skills of Alexander Mustard who won the Coast and Marine category
Dalmally Primary School in Glenview, Dalmally, Scotland, took the School Youth and Community Group Award for a series of studies. The school was awarded £1,000.
An exhibition of around 80 images, including all the winning and commended entries, opens at the Hooper's Gallery in Clerkenwell, London, tonight and a year-long tour of the exhibition will follow throughout England, Scotland and Wales.
The winner of the Animals Portraits award went to Ben Hall for his Gannet portrait
The winner of the category 'Wildlife in my locality' was this image of a canal by Noel Bennett
There is approximately more than 5.7 million miles of paved highway in the United States and in a bid to find new sustainable ways of producing renewable energy, one small Idaho company believes they've found the solution: solar roadways.
According to their website, www.solarroadways.com, the idea revolves around "a series of structurally-engineered solar panels that are driven upon. The idea is to replace all current petroleum-based asphalt roads, parking lots, and driveways with Solar Road PanelsTM that collect and store solar energy to be used by our homes and businesses. This renewable energy replaces the need for the current fossil fuels used for the generation of electricity. This, in turn, cuts greenhouse gases literally in half."
In America, the idea has received a lot of media attention after The Department of Transport awarded the company $100,000 to construct a prototype 12' by 12' panel.
The panels, as expected, are infinitely more complex than a few layers of tarmac and asphalt. According to AutoBlogGreen, the panels consist of three layers; the base contains power and data lines and is overlaid by the electronics strata that contains solar cells, LEDs and super-capacitors which would produce and store electricity.
The LEDs, meanwhile, would "paint" the surface with light and hold the microprocessors and communications device that would make highways "intelligent", flashing messages such as 'Slow' and 'Traffic Delays' to warn drivers. The top layer is made of glass that should supply the same traction as asphalt, and is strong enough to handle whatever traffic can dish out whilst protecting the electronic goodies below.
It can also sense animals on the roadway, heat themselves when they are covered in snow and ice AND act as a power source for electric cars, which would be able to be plugged into the road at points along its length.
Scott Brusaw, the man behind Solar Roadways, believes if every street, driveway and parking lot was replaced with his invention, it would supply three times as much electricity as was used in the US in 2003. Not just that, but the project to cover America with 12′x12′ solar panels would create "2.5 million jobs in assembly alone," taking the country out of its employment lull, making Solar Roadways into the largest employer in the country and America's economic saviour and making Brusaw one of the richest men in the world!
So why hasn't the President ordered every man, woman and child to get a pick axe and begin stripping the asphalt off the highways to get this carbon-cutting, energy-producing, super-highway underway?
Well, firstly, solar panels are notoriously fragile. Can they really take 40-ton vehicles going 80 miles an hour over them day and night for decades? Also, what happens at night? Will they store enough energy to power themselves during the winter months?
Oh, and then there's the price tag - US $35 trillion. Yes, TRILLION. With a 'T'. Each panel is 'currently' predicted to cost around $7,000. Obama's current health-care reform is only meant to cost a measly $1 trillion.
So there we go, it's a fantastic idea and one that could change America's energy and transport infrastructure for ever, but currently it's a pipe dream. An ambitious and undeniably genius pipe dream.
Written by Ernesto
Yesterday it was revealed that, despite her calls for tougher anti-piracy legislation, Lily Allen herself created illicit mixtapes full of copyrighted music and made them available to the public. Today, after having rationalized why it is okay for her to pirate music, she killed her pro-copyright blog because “the abuse was getting too much.”
In a few dozen articles on her new blog, Lily Allen complained how illegal file-sharing is bankrupting the music industry. Unfortunately for her she forgot to remove some of her old mixtapes from LilyAllenMusic.com, which revealed that she’s not the saint she claimed to be.
However, just a few hours after we posted the article, Lily explained that she’s not a pirate but simply didn’t know any better.
“I made those mixtapes 5 years ago, I didn’t have a knowledge of the workings of the music industry back then…,” she responded.
What she probably meant to say is that she had no clue about copyright before her income depended on it. Yet, she believes that every other person on this planet should know better, or get their Internet access cut off. Way to go girl.
In fact, the old Lily from 5 years ago is not too different from the hundreds and thousands of casual file-sharers today. Copyright is a complex issue and the boundaries between right/wrong and illegal/legal are not always that clear. Instead of waging a war against file-sharers on the blog she could have tried to pass her knowledge about copyright on to the public.
She chose to make it a soundboard for frustrated artists instead, which only resulted in negative reactions from the public up to a point where Lily couldn’t take it anymore. Indeed, TorrentFreak read one posting on the site which had in excess of 100 comments – only 4 of which supported the singer’s position.
“I’ve shut down the blog, the abuse was getting too much,” she explained on Twitter a few minutes after she announced the end of her legendary music career.
Just before she pulled the blog she wrote “I will not make another record,” adding “The days of me making money from recording music has been and gone as far as I’m concerned, so I don’t stand to profit from [anti-piracy] legislation.”
There are a lot of lessons to be learned from the debate Lily inflamed over the last week. While there seemed to be an endless stream of rich musicians willing to complain on behalf of bands we’ve never heard of with “we aren’t suffering, they are” statements, there were also huge numbers of music fans who were more than a little reluctant to be lectured by well-off superstars on the issue.
But most prominent were those vehemently opposed to UK plans to disconnect alleged infringers from the Internet. The abuse that Lily spoke of on her blog largely wasn’t directed at her, but at these plans and her support for them. Think again Mr Mandelson.
From the "it'll never happen department" comes the story that 80's action star Jean Claude Van Damme has agreed to a K-1 kickboxing match in Las Vegas against someone named Somluck Kamsing.
Never heard of him? I'll bet you the Nevada State Athletic Commission has and will never allow this supposed March 2010 fight to happen. Kamsing, 35, was the 1996 Olympic Gold medalist in boxing at 126 pounds. He also fought in the 2000 and 2004 Olympics, losing to Rocky Juarez and Benoit Gaudet, respectively. I know what you're thinking, "awesome, Jean-Claude is going to get his faced smashed in," and I agree, that would be fun, but we'll rain on the parade with a reality check, the NSAC would never approve a fight with the 48-year-old Jean Claude facing a former Olympian.
Kamsing has also appeared in action films fighting Jet Li in the Asian version of Fearless, but his boxing resume is too extensive to believe this sham against Van Damme could happen. If it's in Japan, then we've got a whole new ball game.
On a side note, how small are some of these action stars? Kamsing is 5-foot-5 and at best now 150 pounds. Is Van Damme really that small? No wonder why Chuck Zito whipped him.
Germany’s 176th Oktoberfest is underway, with six-million visitors from around the world expected at the 16-day beer festival. Oktoberfest is our kind of festival. It combines some of our favorite things in life: beer, food, and cleavage. In honor of the later, we have put together a gallery of the hottest girls of Oktoberfest, sporting their “Dirndl” – traditional dress. For those of you who want to know about the festival and the beer, we provide the following link to Wikipedia. The rest of you can get to the reason you came here:
The 176th Oktoberfest started on Saturday the 19th, kicked off by Munich Mayor Christian Ude, tapping the first keg with a cry of "O'zapft is!". With predictions of over 6 million visitors heading to Munich, the festival runs until October 4th. This year, a traditional liter of beer will cost visitors about 8 euros (11.75 dollars). And new this year: Oktoberfest iPhone apps, including a dictionary, ordering assistant and a blood-alcohol calculator. Collected here are a few photographs from the first couple of days of Oktoberfest 2009. (31 photos total) More links and information Oktoberfest.de - Official site The Local's guide to Oktoberfest Local.de, 9/18 Oktoberfest - Wikipedia entry
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