List of TV shows canceled after one episode

Read the list on Wikipedia.

Elephant Capable of Humanlike Sounds

He’s no Dumbo the Flying Elephant but with his ability to “speak,” perhaps as close to the Disney cartoon character as a real life elephant can get.

The Everland amusement park said Friday its 16-year-old male Asian elephant, named Kosik, can make sounds imitating up to eight Korean words, including “sit,” “no,” “yes,” and “lie down.”

The pachyderm produces humanlike sounds by putting his trunk in his mouth and shaking it while exhaling - similar to how people whistle with their fingers. But the park said it’s unclear if Kosik knows the meaning of the sounds he makes.

Kim Jong-gap, who has been Kosik’s keeper for 10 years, said he first heard the elephant speak two years ago.

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“It was hard to believe myself at first,” Kim said in a statement. “As I watched Kosik say something after that, I realized he was mimicking my words.”

There have been studies that suggest elephants can mimic sounds, but the park claims that Kosik displays the ability to imitate a human voice.

Spectrograms show Kosik’s voice frequency when he makes human sounds are similar to his keeper’s, Everland said. - more

Private: How Bush wants to make torture the law of the land

President George W. Bush wants to make torture of prisoners legal by steamrolling Congress into passing another bill, like the USA Patriot Act, that ignores freedoms that used to define America. … Many of the harsh interrogation techniques repudiated by the Pentagon on Wednesday would be made lawful by legislation put forward the same day by the Bush administration. And the courts would be forbidden from intervening. … legal experts say it adds up to an apparently unique interpretation of the Geneva Conventions, one that could allow C.I.A. operatives and others to use many of the very techniques disavowed by the Pentagon, including stress positions, sleep deprivation and extreme temperatures.?It?s a Jekyll and Hyde routine,? Martin S. Lederman, who teaches constitutional law at Georgetown University, said of the administration?s dual approaches. … The CIA’s “secret prisons” in Europe that critics said were little more than torture chambers generate intense debate within the Bush White House and with our foreign allies and led to yet another court decision declaring the CIA’s activities illegal. …

Since the terrorist attacks of 9/11 the Bush Administration has sought to treat anyone accused of terrorism as military prisoners of wars and to deny them the rights due others charges with crimes under the Constitution. And the courts have repeatedly ruled against Bush and his actions….

[Reader Comments] “It is the way of evilness to crave sadism to be going on. As to why, I don’t know. Sadism makes it very easy to spot evilness as only evilness has any interest in sadism. Goodness doesn’t use sadism at all ever for any reason whatsoever.”

“Hey, if you’re not guilty of anything, then you shouldn’t mind a little torture to prove you’re innocent, right?”

“the Nazis have finally found a home: The United States of Dumbfuckistan. Now Amurrikans can understand how it happened in Germany.”

Musical Recommendation: Justin Farren

Check out Justin Farren folks. There are some songs from his CD on his site. I’ve been listening to his CD a lot lately. Great stuff! Going to see Justin tonight in Sacramento.

Justin Farren friday- September 8th 9pm @ the Fox’n'Goose on 10th and R streets, Sacramento CA. W/ Sean Hayashi $3-5 21 and over.

She’s Her Own Invisible Twin

Amazing. A handful of people are, on a DNA level, more than one person at the same time. Lydia gave birth to her children, but genetically she is only her children’s aunt. The real mother is her invisible twin. Sound crazy and impossible? Read on…

“… The Department of Social Services called [Lydia Fairchild] and told her to come in immediately. What Fairchild thought was a routine meeting with a social worker turned into an interrogation. …

“As I sat down, they came up and shut the door, and they just went back and just started drilling me with questions like, ‘Who are you?’” Fairchild said. The DNA test results challenged everything she knew about her family. Yes, her boyfriend was the father of the children, and, yes, they were all related, according to the DNA, except for Fairchild. She was told she wasn’t the mother.

Fairchild was certain a mistake must have been made, but she recalled a social worker saying to her, “Nope. DNA is 100 percent foolproof and it doesn’t lie.”

Fairchild was not only denied government assistance for her young children, she was now suspected of possibly acting as a paid surrogate mother and committing welfare fraud. … Fairchild called her obstetrician, Dr. Leonard Dreisbach. He was there for all the births and assured Fairchild he’d vouch for her in court. … But none of that seemed to matter, because DNA tests were considered infallible ? the gold standard in court. DNA showed that Fairchild’s genetic makeup did not match that of her children.

… then she got a break. Across the country, there was another woman with DNA that didn’t match her children’s, but in this case, the doctors had cracked the medical mystery. …

“Any child from a mom and dad should inherit genes from both the mom and the dad. In [Karen Keegan's] case, it appeared that her two boys hadn’t inherited any of her DNA,” said Dr. Lynne Uhl, a pathologist and doctor of transfusion medicine… Keegan told Uhl that she’d had a thyroid nodule removed a while back. After an extensive search, doctors found a sample of her thyroid tissue saved in a nearby lab in the Boston area. According to Uhl, this piece of tissue was the key to solving the medical mystery.

The DNA that would match her sons’ DNA could have been anywhere in Keegan’s body. But her thyroid was where she matched her sons’ genetic code. The mystery was solved. In a way, Keegan was her own twin. … “In her blood, she was one person, but in other tissues, she had evidence of being a fusion of two individuals,” Uhl said. It’s a rare condition called chimerism, with only 30 documented cases worldwide. … In human biology, a chimera is an organism with at least two genetically distinct types of cells ? or, in other words, someone meant to be a twin. But while in the mother’s womb, two fertilized eggs fuse, becoming one fetus that carries two distinct genetic codes ? two separate strands of DNA.

The twin is invisible, but for chimeras the twin lives microscopically inside the body as DNA.

When Uhl told Keegan she was her own twin, Keegan said she was shocked. “You wouldn’t imagine that that could even be possible.”

… After the [new] tests were done, there was proof that Fairchild was her own twin as well. The judge finally believed Fairchild was the biological mother of her children and dismissed the case.” - abcnews

It is also possible for a single person to be genetically four different people. Part human part animal chimeras have also been created.

Fun: I found a maze, not sure where it goes.

If you have some time, you might want to play in this maze. I haven’t gotten very far.

Two More Proven Conspiracy Theories

Conservatives, you should rethink the “tinfoil hat” reaction. Here are two more “nutty conspiracy theories” proven true: massive spying and secret prisons. Big secrets can and do stay hidden. Large conspiracies can be known by only a few top political leaders. Leaks can create a conspiracy theory.

“The [Secret black site CIA] prisons were … illegal in the democratic countries in which they operated. Only a small handful of foreign intelligence officials — and usually one or two top political leaders — ever knew of their existence. Only CIA personnel were allowed on the sites, one of which was located on a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe. Others were once located in Thailand and Afghanistan.” - washpost

Don’t you love how Bush keeps saying we don’t torture, thereby completely refuting all photo and video evidence to the contrary. See Abu Ghraib. Also, note the fall back to the next wall: Only 100 people were ever in the prisons. None are there now, and they were never tortured. Yeah, right.

Another conspiracy theory was that the government secretly monitored the phone conversations of every American. Sounds crazy doesn’t it? Get your TINFOIL HAT! Ha ha. Well, that one is true too.

“Tice says the technology exists to track and sort through every domestic and international phone call as they are switched through centers, such as one in New York, and to search for key words or phrases that a terrorist might use.

“If you picked the word ‘jihad’ out of a conversation,” Tice said, “the technology exists that you focus in on that conversation, and you pull it out of the system for processing.”

According to Tice, intelligence analysts use the information to develop graphs that resemble spiderwebs linking one suspect’s phone number to hundreds or even thousands more.” - abc

Will there be a “mood of relief” when it is finally revealed that 9/11 was an inside job to get popular support for a war?

Bin Laden ‘9/11 video’ broadcast

Compare the noses of Osama. One has a shorter fatter nose. The original Osama (Tim Osman) has a hecka long skinny nose. The real Osama supposedly entered Pakistan the day after 9/11 and died later from Kidney failure. The theory is: Bush knows his business partner and 9/11 patsy expired which is why years ago he said he’s not concerned about Bin Laden. UPDATE 9/10/06: In code words, one might say the trail in seaching for Bin Laden was “stone cold“.

Arabic TV channel Al-Jazeera has broadcast what it says is unseen footage of Osama Bin Laden meeting some of the 9/11 hijackers.

The channel said it showed al-Qaeda leaders “preparing for the attacks and practising their execution”.

Bin Laden is seen walking outdoors in a mountainous area wearing a dark robe and white head gear.

The broadcast came four days before the fifth anniversary of the 11 September 2001 attacks. - bbc

What they should do is have Guiliani personally capture one of their fake Osamas as he is attempting to paint a black eye on the Statue of Liberty… right before the elections. They could then have “Osama” say whatever they wanted. Keep all reporters but their own away due to the “intense security concerns.” We got him! He admits everything! He and Saddam were secretly lovers and they hid Saddam’s WMDs in Osama’s mysterious expandable nose! And so on…

‘Virtually untreatable’ TB found

A “virtually untreatable” form of TB has emerged, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Extreme drug resistant TB (XDR TB) has been seen worldwide, including in the US, Eastern Europe and Africa, although Western Europe has had no cases.

Dr Paul Nunn, from the WHO, said a failure to correctly implement treatment strategies was to blame. TB experts have convened in Johannesburg, South Africa, to discuss how to address the problem.? TB presently causes about 1.7 million deaths a year worldwide, but researchers are worried about the emergence of strains that are resistant to drugs. …

XDR TB is defined as strains that are not only resistant to the front-line drugs, but also three or more of the six classes of second-line drugs. This, according to Dr Paul Nunn, coordinator of the WHO team at the Stop TB department, makes it virtually untreatable. - bbc

Strange “Fire Balls” seen in ND skies

If you were looking up in the sky tonight, you couldn’t miss them. Three large balls of fire.

So what were they?

According to a Bismarck man, they were mostly likely three parts of the same meteor.

Here’s what one of them looked like… a lot like a comet.

But William Pearce, who holds his PHD in Astronomy and teaches at Bismarck State College says this was probably just one peice of three from the same meteor.

It’s not every day you see meteors falling from the sky.

But Pearce says most of the time, they break up as they’re falling into the atmosphere.

No worries according to Pearce.

Once they are in the atmosphere, they fall very quickly.? -kxmb