Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Witchcraft in Papua New Guinea, developing the iWatch and Adele (doesn't) yell at Chris Brown


- I see delusional kooks who see dead people. Haley Joel Osment may not have uttered those words in “The Sixth Sense,” but he would have if the weirdos of Modesto, Calif. freak show/paranormal activity group “Chill Seekers” had been written into the script. These are the kooks who hold séances, insist that inanimate objects are possessed with evil spirits and come up with all sorts of other chicanery that makes the less suggestible among us roll their eyes. Still, even for groups like the Chill Seekers, this is new. Members of the group are convinced that they have concrete proof that a Navy aircraft carrier is haunted. They routinely carry out such investigations and for their most recent case, the group traveled to Alameda on the 70th anniversary of the USS Hornet. The Hornet is an iconic ship with a long and storied history of destroying enemy ships and aircraft, but it has also been rumored to be haunted in recent years. Those tales led the Chill Seekers, a group founded one year ago, to make the road trip to visit the ship and see for themselves if it truly is haunted. They have already spent thousands of dollars of their own money on equipment that they hope will help them find what they are looking for, so these mental cases are all-in and there is no bailing out now. Their investigations center on what they call a "spirit box," which scans through radio frequencies. Chill Seekers members believe spirits communicate using white noise and by manipulating transmissions, so monitoring radio frequencies is the best way to determine if they are present or not. Group members know they will be heckled, doubted and mocked, and have issued an open challenge to waste several hours of your time by going on one of their hunts and seeing for yourself just what a bunch of windbags they are………


- Adele has never been accused of being the most pleasant, sunny person in the music industry, but she insists that the heat she’s receiving for allegedly screaming down noted misogynist Chris Brown Sunday night at the Grammy Awards. Images surfaced after the show of Adele, standing a few feet from Brown with her mouth agape and a stern expression on her face, appearing to scream at him for his refusal to stand when Frank Ocean won an award. Brown and Ocean nearly brawled in a recording studio parking lot a couple of weeks back and when Ocean won Best Urban Contemporary Album, Brown remained seated while the rest of the crowd stood and cheered. Initially, it seemed that the British songstress took issue with that perceived lack of respect and openly chided Brown for it, but she took to Twitter to let everyone know that wasn’t the case. 
“Chris Brown and I were complimenting each other in that photo actually!” she tweeted on Tuesday. Although the picture in question seems to show a very different story, a second photo from the evening showed Adele and Brown posing happily for a picture together, so maybe she is telling the truth and she is one of the two or three people in the world who does not currently have a beef with Brown. The story would be so much better if she had excoriated Brown and reamed him in front of some of the biggest names in the industry for being a Grade-A d-bag who wouldn’t even get off his butt and do a polite golf clap for an award winner because the two of them are beefing like a couple of 10-year-old fighting over who gets to play the Xbox next, but there are always other awards shows Adele can ream someone at………


- Just as a death in the über-dangerous X-Games event known as Snowmobile Freestyle was probably inevitable, so too was the reaction after that first death took place. Snowmobile Freestyle competitor Caleb Moore died from injuries suffered at X Games Aspen last month. He passed away on Jan. 31 in Colorado, one week after his attempt at a backflip in the freestyle event failed and the skis on his 450-pound snowmobile caught the lip of the landing area and sent him flying over the handlebars. In an event where competitors fly dozens of feet into the air on 500-pound snowmobiles and perform maneuvers that leave them temporarily detached from said snowmobiles as those machines float above them in mid-air, it seemed inevitable that something would go horribly wrong and a rider would not survive. Moore, a four-time X Games Snowmobile Freestyle medalist, became that first casualty and now, the fallout has begun. With X Games going global more than ever this year, a snowmobile freestyle exhibition was scheduled for X Games Tignes 2013 in France next month. That event has been canceled, ESPN announced Tuesday, citing a review of the sport that began after Moore’s death. "Our review of snowmobile freestyle continues. In the meantime, we have decided to forego the planned demonstration freestyle event at X Games Tignes," ESPN, which now runs X Games, said in its statement. Without the snowmobile event, X Games Tignes the second of six global X Games events this year, will feature snowboarding and skiing competition. Along with ESPN, the International Series of Champions canceled freestyle events that had been planned in conjunction with AMSOIL Championship Snocross races in Williamsburg, Mich., and Lake Geneva, Wis., out of respect for Moore. All of these gestures are fine, but maybe this all should have happened sooner, before someone died…….


- Who knew the spirit of the Salem witch trials was still alive and well in the 21st century? Give it up for Papua New Guinea, where a woman accused of witchcraft was stripped, tortured and bound by a group of fanatical accusers who then burned her alive in front of hundreds of witnesses in a small town. Amazingly, no one stepped in to stop the murder and it instantly became one of the highest profile sorcery-related murders in the history of the South Pacific island nation. Worse still, many of the locals treated the event as if it were all a show or a holiday parade, taking pictures of the entire assault. Papua New Guinea’s prime minister, police and diplomats all condemned the killing of Kepari Leniata, a 20-year-old mother who had been accused of sorcery by relatives of a 6-year-old boy who died in the hospital the day before, police spokesman Dominic Kakas said. Leniata was tortured with a hot iron rod, bound, doused in gasoline, then set alight on a pile of car tires and trash in the Western Highlands provincial capital of Mount Hagen in a scene that feels like it should have happened three centuries ago. Deputy Police Commissioner Simon Kauba doesn’t sound impressed with the efforts of Mount Hagen investigators and excoriated them for failing to make a single arrest, Kakas said. "He was very, very disappointed that there's been no arrest made as yet," Kakas said. Attendees for the murder reportedly refused to cooperate with police, whom Kauba believes are not putting enough effort into solving the case. "The incident happened in broad daylight in front of hundreds of eyewitnesses and yet we haven't picked up any suspects yet. He was very, very curious about that and he blasted the investigators on the phone," Kakas added. The prime suspect so far is the victim’s own husband, who made himself look much less suspicious by fleeing the province. Sorcery has long been a part of Papuan New Guinean culture, but responses to alleged sorcery has grown increasingly violent in recent years. Police Commissioner Tom Kulunga described the murder as "shocking and devilish” and suggested that it might be time for the island nation’s people to move into a more modern era. "We are in the 21st century and this is totally unacceptable," Kulunga said in a statement. Hell, at this point the 19th century would be a massive upgrade………


- Apple has mastered devices you can sit on your desktop and use to go online, ones that you can hold in your hand and use to Skype, others than sit on your lap and allow you to edit videos and gadgets that store your entire digital music library, so what’s next for the house that Steve Jobs built? How about the iWatch? Rumors are growing increasingly prevalent that the so-called "iWatch" may indeed be more than just a pet project and could in fact be on track as a bonafide, top-priority endeavor. Sources claim that Apple's wristwatch team has as many as 100 product designers on it, including senior director of engineering James Foster and manager Achim Pantfoerder, and even if that 100-member team is a slight exaggeration, there is enough smoke wafting up into the air to suggest that the company has indeed been working on the idea for some time. Multiple reports have sketched out a picture of a team that includes managers, members of the marketing group and software and hardware engineers who previously worked on the iPhone and iPad. Few details have leaked out about the watch, but it reportedly sports a curved glass surface and runs a modified version of iOS. Depending on whom you believe, the watch may already be in testing and Apple has reached out to manufacturers about coming on board. The company has tried its hand at wearable devices in the past, mostly fitness trackers, but none has ever developed enough to hit the market. Maybe the iWatch is the culmination of those efforts and a sign that Apple has learned from its past mistakes and is ready to combine the idea of wearable technology and something other than a computer, which could be good given that its profits last year were the lowest they had been in some time……..

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