baby sky and daddy

Sebastian the Cat Gets Gold Teeth

ALEXANDRIA, Ind. (Aug. 16) - This cool cat has traded in his catnip for some bling. Sebastian, a one-year-old Persian with long black hair, sports gold crowns on his two bottom canines, which grew sticking out from his lips in an underbite similar to a bulldog's.

His owner, dentist David Steele, said he gave Sebastian gold crowns to help strengthen the fanged feline's teeth. Steele said he was worried the unique canines would break off or become a problem.

"It's possible to work on animals the same way we do humans," he said. "I did it to strengthen (Sebastian's) teeth, but it had an excellent cosmetic result. The cat gets a lot of attention now. Everyone is tickled to death when they see him."

Sebastian's two gold teeth protruding from his furry face make him seem a little menacing, like a hip-hop star's guard-cat or a movie villain's pet. The feline didn't seem too happy with his new look at first.

"He's normally around me all the time," Steele said. "After I put the crowns on, he didn't 'speak' to me for two days."

When Sebastian was tranquilized about a month ago to get his coat trimmed, Steele used the occasion to take impressions of his teeth. He then sent those impressions to a company that prepares crowns for his human patients.

"They called back and asked me what I was up to," Steele said.

Two weeks ago, veterinarian Larry Owen tranquilized the cat at the Alexandria Animal Hospital about 30 miles northeast of Indianapolis so Steele could do the dentistry work, which took about 15 minutes to complete.

Owen said putting gold crowns on teeth can be done for any pet with a dental problem.

"Mostly, though, it was a fun thing to do," Owen said. "(Steele is) always up to something or trying something new."

Steele said he has put a crown on a cat once before, after the animal was hit by a car. He also put a gold crown on his Boston terrier.

Steele said the cost for each gold tooth is about the same as for humans - about $900 each

did i get skeeter in the pic or the red x?

this is a pic of me and my daughter.she was a few months old at the time of this pic.she'll be two in november.i posted another pic of her in a blog entry earlier this month.

skeeter    my chihuahua                   

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (Aug. 15) - Single male (red hair, long arms, interests include hanging in trees and grooming) seeks female for long-distance relationship and possibility of meeting up in future to help save species.

Zookeepers in the Netherlands are planning to hook up Dutch and Indonesian orangutans over the Internet and believe the link could at some stage be used as an online dating service where apes could get to know one another and keepers could work out whether they would be compatible mates.

First things first: A romantic dinner for two.

"We are going to set up an Internet connection between Indonesia and Apeldoorn so that the apes can see each other and, by means of pressing a button, be able to give one another food, for example," said Anouk Ballot, a spokeswoman for the Apenheul ape park in the central Dutch city of Apeldoorn.

She said the chance of two orangutans actually mating as a result of the online interaction was small due to the problem of transporting them between the Netherlands and Indonesia. "But I wouldn't rule it out completely," she told The Associated Press.

Ballot said the primary aim of the computer link between Apenheul and an orangutan center on the Indonesian part of Borneo was to raise public awareness of the apes and their plight. Activists say that the spread of palm oil plantations, coupled with logging, especially on Malaysian and Indonesian territories on Borneo island, is threatening animals such as wild orangutans with extinction by chewing up their native jungle habitat.

Ballot said that, in the past, captive orangutans separated by a wall have communicated with one another via a mirror placed in front of the two enclosures. Using Web cams and computer screens is an extension of that, she said.

She stressed that only orangutans who show a natural interest and aptitude will take part. The Apenheul park has 13 orangutans among its collection of apes.

There is still work to be done to set up the Internet connection. "We need to find ape-proof cables and screens," Ballot said, adding that the zoo hopes to have the orangutans online by the end of this year or early 2007.

So next time you run into someone in a chatroom and think "what a baboon," think twice: it just might be.

been a good while since i posted pick 3 predictions on the board here at lottery post.been even longer since i posted in the pick 3 forum.i've been busy with the pick 4 for a while but i think i'm ready to return to pick 3 too.i think the north carolina lottery pick 3 will be a real challenge and i would like to bet on it if betslips starts to offer it.i'm getting up support for it now.everyone needs to e-mail betslips and request that they offer it.......

wondering when the first quad will hit in tennessee?

south carolina has been at it going on three or four years now and still hasn't had its first quad yet.

look for 6584 soon in tennessee.....

China Bans 'Simpsons' From Prime Time Television

BEIJING (Aug. 13) - D'oh! China has banished Homer Simpson, Pokemon and Mickey Mouse from prime time.

Beginning Sept. 1, regulators have barred foreign cartoons from TV from 5 to 8 p.m. in an effort to protect China's struggling animation studios, news reports said Sunday. The move allows the Monkey King and his Chinese pals to get the top TV viewing hours to themselves.

Foreign cartoons, especially from Japan, are hugely popular with China's 250 million children and the country's own animation studios have struggled to compete. Communist leaders are said to be frustrated that so many cartoons are foreign-made, especially after efforts to build up Chinese animation studios.

The ban hasn't been formally announced, but newspapers already were criticizing it Sunday as the wrong way to improve programming.

"This is a worrying, shortsighted policy and will not solve the fundamental problems in China's cartoon industry," the Southern Metropolis News said. "The viewing masses, whether adults or children, will have no choice but to passively support Chinese products."

Chinese animators produce hundreds of hours of programs a year but aren't known for flair or originality. They draw on traditional stories such as "Journey to the West," about the adventures of the Monkey King, and have yet to invent characters to match the appeal of Mickey Mouse or Japanese icons such as Pokemon.

The cartoon campaign comes amid efforts by President Hu Jintao's government to tighten control over other pop culture, ranging from movies to magazines and Web sites.

TV stations have been told to limit foreign programming, stop showing scary movies in prime time and have their hosts dress more conservatively and use fewer English words on the air.

Most cartoons on China Central Television, the national broadcaster, are Chinese-made. But more freewheeling local broadcasters show everything from "The Simpsons" to Japanese, South Korean and European cartoons dubbed into Chinese.

Film studios have been pushed to merge in order to create big, well-financed competitors. Officials have set up 15 animation centers to nurture the industry, invoking communist guerrilla vocabulary by dubbing them "production bases."

"The reason for the regulation is clear. It is to protect domestic cartoon production," the Southern Metropolis said.

The newspaper cited what it said was a recent study that found that 80 percent of Chinese children surveyed liked foreign cartoons and disliked domestic animation.

Chinese studios employ thousands of skilled animators, but many focus on doing work subcontracted by Walt Disney Co., Warner Bros. and other Western or Japanese studios.

Broadcasters were told to limit use of foreign cartoons in 2000 at a time when Japanese animation dominated the market. In 2004, the government stepped up controls, saying Chinese cartoons had to account for at least 60 percent of the total shown in prime time.

In February, regulators banned programs that mix animation with live characters in an apparent effort to protect Chinese studios, which don't produce such programming. Regulators haven't released details, but the ban could affect popular children's TV shows such as "Blue's Clues" from the United States and Britain's "Teletubbies."

The government also protects Chinese film studios by limiting imports of foreign titles. But that strategy appears to have backfired by creating a market for pirated movies, which both foreign and Chinese studios say robs them of box office revenues.

On Sunday, Chinese moviemakers accused TV stations of becoming part of the nation's thriving movie piracy industry, airing up to 1,500 pirated Chinese movies a year.

Beijing also has thrown up barriers to other pop culture.

In April, the government disclosed it was no longer granting publishing licenses for foreign magazines in an effort to protect its domestic industry. That came after a joint venture that published a Chinese edition of "Rolling Stone" was forced to dissolve after a single issue.

look for 8888 in kentucky or illinois soon for pick 4........

AOL security breach puts Web on notice

More than 600,000 users had their search queries posted online. Some individuals can be identified.

Although the benefits of a Google search or an eBay purchase for most people outweigh the Internet's many threats and nuisances, this firewall factor is taking a big toll in costs and consumer consternation.

In recent days a furor has emerged over a colossal miscalculation in which a team at America Online (AOL) publicly posted the Internet search topics of hundreds of thousands of customers online. The goal was to support academic research about Web traffic, and AOL users' names were replaced by numbers. But that didn't guarantee anonymity.

The result was a major breach of trust and privacy that went from abstract concern to concrete fear when The New York Times was able to trace the identity of a Georgia woman based on her search queries.

This comes as the Department of Homeland Security this week urged users of Microsoft's Windows software to take steps to shield themselves from the latest malicious software attack. It also follows a string of computer security breaches at several federal agencies this year. The most alarming case happened in May, when the theft of a Department of Veterans Affairs laptop jeopardized the personal information of millions of former US soldiers.

"The danger is growing" as sensitive personal information increasingly resides online or in databases, says Paul Saffo, director of the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, Calif. "You leave a digital wake behind you in cyberspace, and that trail never fades. That's the problem."

Wake-up call for Web companies

It's a threat to consumers, but also to corporations like AOL or Google. They have much to gain by tracking online behavior - and using the information to develop new products or to target ad pitches to specific people. But they also lose to the extent that customers are put off by intrusive policies, or if data breaches result in lawsuits.

"Think twice about it," Mr. Saffo advises businesses. "You may discover that private information is the new dioxin or the new asbestos.... This is a vast liability."

AOL could face lawsuits from members of the online community who contend that their privacy was violated in the recent lapse.

The chief executive of Google said Wednesday that the company would not change its policies as a result of AOL's mishap. "We are reasonably satisfied ... that this sort of thing would not happen at Google, although you can never say never," chief executive Eric Schmidt said.

At least one rival search engine, Ixquick.com, is trying to build its business on a pledge of privacy - that it won't keep records of users' Internet addresses.

AOL, for its part, has apologized and removed the user data from the Internet, but not before some other groups had copied it to other sites where it remains available.

The challenges hardly mean that society will retreat from the digital age. The trend, indeed, has been toward more online exposure of identity, not less. In the past year, MySpace.com has exploded in Web-traffic rankings as a venue for people to publicize themselves and connect with potentially millions of others.

Experts generally say that society is getting benefits from the technology that far outweigh the damage done by security gaps.

"Some of us yearn for the pioneer days [without computers], but I'm not sure how many of us do," says Stuart Madnick, a computer expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management in Cambridge.

He uses the analogy of electricity. The grid sometimes goes dark, but when it's on, people have services such as air conditioning and television that weren't available 100 years ago.

"We just need to do a much better job" at managing the risks that go along with networked computing, he says.

Beefing up security

Often problems crop up because of outsiders - hackers often use e-mail to send viruses that take over other computers.

But an important lesson, Dr. Madnick says, is that serious problems also stem from insiders at corporations or agencies who either accidentally leave information vaults "unlocked" or who maliciously embezzle data.

Among the many solutions, one is to improve internal checks and balances in organizations, so that it's hard for any individual to single- handedly cause a major breach.

It's clear that as computer crime grows, so does the cost of combating it.

People can buy a personal computer for $500, but using it to surf the Web at home is risky without security software that is continuously updated, at a cost of $30 a year or more.

At work, the cubicle set is having to change passwords more often. In the federal government, $4.5 billion of the $65 billion spent annually on information technology now goes for security, a Bush administration budget official said recently.

The good news, Madnick says, is that society is starting to wake up to the challenge. "We're going through ... a slow cultural change," he says. "The awareness aspect is rising."

well i've been on a dry spell for a while.sure could use a hit.as you know i play pick 4 straight.when i win i win big but sometimes there are long dry spells between hits.sure could use a couple thousand to get me through the rest of the year.my winnings from the spring carried me over until now and i'm finally running low.

this has been one long hot miserable summer.probably the worst one i've ever encountered.it has been hell literally.working in this heat when you can't breathe is not something i like doing but i've done it.i do guard work so i walk around a boiler,kiln and mill that have no mercy and will suck every breath you thought of breathing out of your body so fast you won't know what hit you.lost a lost of weight this summer not to mention being completely miserable.i'll be so glad when late september and early october arrives.i have also had the worst luck lotto wise too.have hit nothing all summer after having a very very good spring.i won nearly 5 grand this spring but nothing this summer.when i look back on this summer it won't be fondly and in fact i'll probably want to forget it.....