Click on 'Read More' for Midwest FurFest's August newsletter. Find out what's up with furry fandom's coolest (pun possibly intended) convention!

CBS News reports that a 1500-lb bull moose decided to beat the heat by hopping into a Spokane family's back yard pool. Although the pool owner was startled, he did manage to snap a photo before the moose exited the pool and hopped over the fence to leave, presumably refreshed. You can see the photo here.

Jerry Beck's Cartoon Research website quotes a "Variety" report that Hayao Miyazaki's newest animated feature, about a young girl whose parents are turned into pigs and who must venture into a bizarre fantasy world to save them, is setting new box records in Japan that far surpass the records set by Miyazaki's "Princess Mononoke", Japan's top-grossing film upon its release in 1997. Incidentally, although "Cartoon Research" is about all animation and not just funny animals, there is plenty of news about other funny animal theatrical and TV cartoon projects.

Editor's note: In case it's unclear, the movie concerned is Spirited Away

Despite the seriousness of the topic of protecting what little Florida wetland remains, I had to get several chuckles out of this spoof in The Onion:

Endangered Manatee Struggles to Make Self Understood to Congress

Sci-fi Wire reports that Warner Brothers Television has greenlighted a pilot for a proposed series based on Wizard of Oz books by Frank Baum. The series will be set 60 years after Dorothy's adventures in Oz, and will center on a young woman who comes to Oz and winds up leading a rebellion against the Emerald City. No news on which, if any, characters from the actual books will appear in the series. You can read the Sci-Fi wire story here.

At the recent RoboCup, Sony's AIBOs played soccer. Sort of a more civilized version of the Robot Wars program on TV. It's worth going to MSNBC just to see the pictures of the dogs splayed on the playing field. Anthropomorphics in its most literal form!

Cats. Computers. From the Meisha Merlin website. See http://www.meishamerlin.com/CatsinCyberspace.html for a picture of the cover and ordering information.

From NPR's Morning Edition. From this, we learn two things: 1) society often reacts badly to nonconformity, and 2) don't wear your fursuit in the streets of Almaty. :)



"Host Alex Chadwick talks to a Central Asian human rights monitor about the Kazahkstan government's arrest of people with "bohemian" lifestyles. That includes those who dress up like Hobbits, the gnome-like creatures from the J.R.R. Tolkien fantasy books. The interviewee is Saule Muthametrakhimova, an editor for the London-based Institute for War and Peace Reporting."

Californians for Ferret Legalization has been passing around petitions for the legalization of (of course) ferrets. As of yesterday, the running tally of signatures for this year's petiton has reached an unprecedented 28,000.

To drum up more signatures, the group plans a symbolic ride for the petition from San Fransisco's East Bay to Sacramento on September 5th.

More information on the petition and other ferret legalization news, as well as printable copies of the advertisement poster and petition can be found at the CFL website.

Please consider signing up your Californian freinds and sending it in by August 29th for the final count.

DaliLab Inc (short for Distributed Artificial Life) has started Daliworld.net, a virtual internet fishtank. Like Napster, this takes advantage of connected nodes of computers, but instead of sharing files, you're sharing fascinating, realistic fish in a reef enviroment.

Unlike the average screensaver, the programmers of Dali have tried to create an artifical ocean enviroment, where fish can swim as they please across the internet, living, dieing and multiplying like real fish. There is even code set in for further generations' evolution and adaptation to avoid preditors and to find better places to swim.

True, it doesn't take a lot of smarts to be a fish, but this is another example of the vast changes in processing power in computers.
To download DaliWorld's fish program, go to the DaliWorld website

Ran across this tonight after a long night of rebuilding a network. I'd heard about the game but I had not heard about a feature film before.


I sometimes wonder if Mr Bluth has more lives than a cat but considering its Dragon's Lair, I'll hope for the best. After all, the last time Bluth was truly out on his own he somehow managed to come up with Secret of NIMH.


For full info head over to Ain't It Cool News:

http://www.aint-it-cool-news.com/display.cgi?id=9855.

Episodes of Futurama and Invader Zim won Emmy Awards for achievement in animation. More information is available from SF Wire. I've seen Futurama (and enjoyed it greatly), but I haven't heard of Invader Zim. Has anyone caught an episode of it?

In unrelated stories, BBC News online reports that thousands of crocodiles face starvation in Paraguay due to the diversion of a river, and that thirteen giant pandas have recently been artificially inseminated in China--since twins are common when pandas are artificially inseminated, officials hope as many as 20 baby pandas will soon be born.

BBC News online reports that the most famous coffee maker on the internet has been sold. Back in 1991 computer students at Cambridge got tired of taking long hikes to the coffee room only to find the pot empty, so they rigged up one of the first web cams, allowing anyone in the building (and, incidentally, anyone on the net) to check the coffee pot from the comfort of their computer chair. The computer department is moving to a new building, and has decided to sell the old pot. The full story, with a few more fun details, can be read here.

Now, first of, I'd like to note this isn't some "New Yorker" sort of gay publication. It's always full of sex articles, the raunchier the better. So the focus on sex is not actually something they themselves as the publication (and presumably their readers) see as bad. Also, as a gay publication, they choose to focus often on homosexuality in the various fandoms.