The fine folks at MIT surgically merged an Ethernet switch and a teddy bear. The bear now has glowing power/uplink eyes, an ethernet jack in each paw, and a Matrix-style uplink in the back of its neck. It's neat }:>.

Main project page is here.
A cool close-up of the bear is here.

In keeping with the theme of this year's convention, Anthrocon will hold an INVENTION FAIR to showcase the creative talents of our members. Entry is quite simple: design a novel device, implement, article of clothing, system, etc. that fits one of the following categories:

Two interesting articles found in the on-line edition of the Fortean Times. They're not as scholarly as they claim, but entertaining to read.

The first covers the spiritial aspects of shapeshifting stories with a Carl Jung viewpoint. The second article speculates the Seal people myths (who shed their seal skins to become people) in Scotland may have been modeled after an aboriginal sea kayaking tribe.

Mundane world got you down? Go Wild at Feral! 2002.

Feral! is proud to announce that our Guest of Honour this year is Jessica (Ginger) Willard! The creator of the lovable Falstaff will be teaching two drawing classes, so if you've ever wanted to get advice from Ginger, now's your chance!

For any furry fan that's into action figures you just have to check out the newest line by Stan Winston. These appear to be well made anthropomorphic felines. I've seen them on Furbid and on Furnation advertised. There's a sabertoothed cat, a lynx, cheetah (or leopard), and a few other puma like ones. Two are female and the rest of the series are male. They are for sale on Amazon.com for 14.99 plus shipping or possibly at your local Toys R Us. Definitely get yourself a set because on the www.stanwinstoncreatures.com web page it talks about anothe upcoming series called Blood Wolves. Not sure myself but perhaps it will be a canine series!

The cow who made national headlines last week by escaping a Cincinatti, OH meat processing facility was finally captured using decoys and tranquilizers.

Read the story on CNN.

Despite the long ban on the international trade in ivory, an increase in world tourism to places like Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam is also showing a huge increase in people buying illegal ivory trinkets and bribing them out of the country. A Save the Elephants sponsored report on the state of wild elephants found as few as 85 in Vietnam, and says it's mainly the ivory which is causing the wildspread killing of elephants.

Further Confusion Art show Checks are in the mail. As of February 16, all
artists checks have been mailed. Thats 19 days, a new record for us. Please
be watching for them. Final figures will be forthcoming but our art show this
year set a new record with over $41,000 in art sales from the show and just
over 100 pieces going to voice auction.

Our huge thanks to Walksfar and the art show staff as well as all the art show
artists, buyers and viewers.

--
Further Confusion
info@furtherconfusion.org
http://www.furtherconfusion.org/

Sci Fi Wire reports that a deal is in the works to show all existing episodes of Wolf Lake on UPN. Sci Fi Wire article here.

Read the news story here.
Chinese student "tests bear intelegence" by tricking them and pouring acid on zoo bears. The common belief locally is that bears are dumb, so a university student, Liu Haiyang, set about attacking caged zoo bears to prove humans are in fact the stupider animal.

As the date for Megaplex draws closer, we'd like to show you some of the events we have planned. Hopefully there is something to appeal to everyone.

I've recently put photos and a theory discussion online for my digitigrade stilts project. In case any flayrah readers were curious about this kind of thing, I'm submitting it here.

URL: http://www.angelfire.com/d20/roll_d3_for_this

I'm sure others have done this too. But my design is still elegant };>.

Chuck Jones is reported as having died today at age 89 on the website: http://www.cartoonresearch.com/news.html

God's Creatures, the Christian Furry mail group, will be moving to a new advertising-free server effective March 3, 2002. For more information about subscribing to the new God's Creatures, browse to http://ursine.dyndns.org/gc . The move is being made in protest of new policies that moderator G. Raymond Eddy (a.k.a. Angel Bear) finds very disturbing.

Hiya everyfur

I have been informed by my registrar that the .ws namespace experienced some problems last night, resulting in a bunch of domain names being redirected to Under Construction pages instead of the correct IP addresses. Furbid.ws appears to be back online, for the
most part; the correct IP address has propagated again. Please let me know if you're still getting that Under Construction page. Contact address: aatheus@transfur.com

I've extended any auctions that would have closed during the domain name downtime. Let me reiterate: the furbid.ws disappearence was in no way related to FurBid's server or connectivity. Nic.ws screwed up our record's propagated data.

If you're still having trouble accessing FurBid, http://furbid.transform.to is still online, or you can access directly via IP (http://198.137.201.181). I apologize for their screwup.