Scenes of Japan after the Earthquake and Tsunami

Let's pray for everyone's safety especially those countries that were hit by the earthquake and tsunami. Pray.


*source:
reuters.com

Israeli Model dies after Snake bites her breast

It was reported that the snake also died from silicone poisoning shortly after the model died. Check out how the model licks the snakes head & eventually the snake bit her breast. Wanna play my snake? LOL




*picture source: sg.yfittopostblog.com

8.9 Magniture Earthquake hits Japan!

*video source: CNN.com




Earthquake and Tsunami hit Japan and destroyed the building and surroundings like toys. Let's pray for our brother's and sister's who are in Japan and around the world for our safety.

LeBron’s heart, game belong in Ohio

Here was Kevin Garnett(notes), who spent 12 seasons going from prep phenom to NBA star without lifting the lowly Minnesota Timberwolves to a championship. And there was LeBron James(notes), seven years into the same journey with the Cleveland Cavaliers, now on the brink of free agency.

”Loyalty is something that hurts you at times because you can’t get youth back,” Garnett said after his Celtics dismissed the Cavs from the playoffs Thursday night. Garnett would know. He lost his youth in Minnesota only to finally find that elusive championship in Boston two years ago. He was telling LeBron to take care of himself, not the franchise that drafted him.

Garnett isn’t wrong, but he’s forgetting something in the equation, too.

As sure as you can’t get youth back, you also can’t get loyalty back.

LeBron James can, and will, do whatever he pleases over the next couple months in deciding his future. There are no wrong choices when you’re being courted with multimillion-dollar contracts and fawning fans and various levels of power and control.

Everyone is going to offer something. The promise of a championship. A supporting cast. Perhaps LeBron’s choice in coach, general manager, free-agent signings and draft picks. If LeBron’s cadre of advisors can dream it up, they’ll ask for it.

It’s only in Cleveland, though, that the ultimate intangible remains. This is home. This is northeast Ohio. This is unfinished business, unfulfilled promise. This is where all the sporting pain and disappointment that LeBron grew up with exists – no championships in any sport since 1964. None.

”I understand the burden of the Cleveland sports fan,” he said.

Since he developed into a high school star in Akron, LeBron spoke of pleasing his people, putting his hometown on the map. Even as a 16-year-old he reveled in national media coming to his town. After the Cavs drafted him, he spoke endlessly about delivering that long-sought championship parade. He said it would be a celebration like no other. He isn’t wrong about that.

So now, with the times getting tough, with other cities batting their eyes, he’s just going to walk away?

This decision will say a lot about James. And if he’s off to Chicago or New York it will disappoint many who have known him the longest, in a way that goes beyond the selfishness of fandom.

If he walks, he walks on what a lot of people believe he is about – substance behind all that on-court sizzle.

There’s no reason to go. The Cavs can pay him more salary. Nike and Gatorade will honor the same contracts. At 25 and in his prime (two MVP trophies), there’s no need to panic.

In the short run, there may be advantages elsewhere. The Bulls offer young talents Derrick Rose(notes) and Joakim Noah(notes). Miami has Dwyane Wade(notes) and the elite coach the others lack in Pat Riley, who could immediately return to the bench.

Everything else is just smoke and mirrors and promises that may be impossible to fulfill. The Knicks and the Clippers are selling hype and stars, probably to cover the pathetic ownership records of James Dolan and Donald Sterling. The Nets have Jay-Z, a Russian billionaire and a possible new arena in Brooklyn, a lot of moving parts with no track record.

Cleveland has the heart. Cleveland has the story. Cleveland has the people. LeBron has always expressed a deep understanding of what all of that means.

The supporting cast needs to get better, but that can happen. Besides, James himself signed off on nearly every roster move of the last seven years. He’s at least part to blame. If he wants coach Mike Brown gone, he’ll be gone. If he wants Kentucky coach John Calipari installed on the bench, then a Brink’s truck will be dispatched to Lexington.

Cavs owner Dan Gilbert knows his franchise hangs in the balance. He made part of his fortune selling subprime loans that often went bust. He knows what depreciating property is all about – especially when there’s no one willing to sell a credit default swap on the Cavs.

This is high-stakes stuff. If LeBron leaves, Gilbert’s investment loses tens of millions, if not a hundred million in value. Pro hoops will be decimated in Ohio. So Gilbert will spare no expense. What choice does he have?

James can try to command power from the Bulls’ Jerry Reinsdorf or the Heat’s Micky Arison, but he won’t get it like he will from Gilbert. Having a 25-year-old run everything may not be for the best, but right now LeBron doesn’t seem all that certain he realizes what the best is.

LeBron spoke Thursday night of ”his team” and he wasn’t talking about the Cavs. He meant his army of enablers who ”have a plan” on how to handle the summer.

It’s where the problem begins and ends. The Summer of LeBron is as much about them as it is him – although he’s clearly thrilled at the wining and dining to come. LeBron loves being the center of attention and his free agency will overshadow even the NBA Finals. He doesn’t call himself the King for nothing.

The crew of hangers-on that surround LeBron have spent the past few years living off this moment, selling power, the perception of power and even power they don’t have to boost their own careers and make their own fortunes and reputations.

This is LeBron’s agent. This is LeBron’s cousin. This is LeBron’s Nike guy. The world opens just that quickly. Next thing you know they’re demanding video of LeBron getting dunked on in a pick-up game.

LeBron has let them take over his life. He wants yes men and he’s got ‘em. And together they’ve created this free-agent hysteria. It is, perhaps, why James didn’t even seem himself in these playoffs – distant, detached and emotionless in defeat. When the Cavs lost to the Orlando Magic in last season’s Eastern Conference finals, James stood brooding in front of his locker before walking out in anger at what had transpired. He left the court without shaking the Magic players’ hands and then bolted the arena without addressing the media.

He got ripped for it. At least he looked like he cared. Thursday? Not so much. He looked like a guy who might give up on the whole project, just like that.

If it’s a different LeBron James, if all the quotes and stories and loyalty to Ohio he used to display are now gone under a sea of advisors and the tantalizing emotion of being wanted, then Cleveland fans should really be nervous.

LeBron never went to college. He was so good he was never recruited. At one of his St. Vincent-St. Mary games during his sophomore year of high school I sat next to former West Virginia assistant coach Drew Catlett who had come to take a look at this young star everyone was buzzing about. After a half of LeBron domination, Catlett aware that snow was piling up outside, decided to pack up and head back to Morgantown. LeBron James, he said, was too good to waste time on.

”He’s never playing college ball,” Catlett said. By James’ junior year, no college was really bothering.

So now here comes the recruitment LeBron never had. Here comes the ego gratification. If LeBron had been forced to go to college by the NBA’s since-implemented age minimum, the derby to sign him would’ve been the wildest of all time. It never materialized until now. And this is bigger. Everything is above board: huge cities, professional fan bases and breathless media – New York, L.A., Chicago, Miami … and Cleveland.

What LeBron wants is anyone’s guess. He mentions winning, which isn’t saying much. He wants money; that’s always been clear. He isn’t going broke in any of these places.

He’s also long discussed legacy and in a way that made you believe he understood what that really meant. In this case, not following Michael Jordan’s path in Chicago, but blazing his own in Cleveland.

LeBron once told me that if he had gone to college he would’ve signed with the University of Akron, the hometown mid-major. The reasons, he said, were numerous. He loved Akron. Some of his high school teammates were going there. The clincher was that his first high school coach, Keith Dambrot, who had helped teach him the game, had become Akron’s head coach.

”Why not?” LeBron said, smiling.

It’s a quaint story. To this day Dambrot thinks he would’ve gotten him. Of course, LeBron has also said at other times he would’ve gone to a half-dozen different schools, so it probably wouldn’t have happened.

But that he even imagined the possibility was rare. Elite recruits aren’t aware enough to know their biggest impact could be at home, not at some far-off hoops factory, that their old coach and old teammates mean more than some smooth recruiting pitch, that turning the basketball world on its ear by doing something so daring and unique can be the coolest idea of them all.

They don’t get that the Dukes and UCLAs need them more than they need the Dukes and UCLAs.

The Akron story said something about LeBron James.

Or maybe it didn’t.

*source: sports.yahoo.com

Video: Kobe's hangin', two-handed, over-the-head scoop shot

Fist bumps and cake to Navjot Productions for splicin' together what we were all thinking: Kobe Bryant's(notes) hanging, two-handed, over-the-head scoop shot against the Pistons was so Michael Jordan-esque it hurts.

"It was a lucky shot," Bryant said afterward with a shrug of his shoulders. "I just flicked it up and it went in."

Man says 30-foot 'monster' lurking in canals of Madeira Beach

There's something strange and big swimming in the canals of Madeira Beach along the Pinellas County coast. Those who have seen it say it's no fish and think it could be a sea serpent.

Russ Sittlow, 78, has seen it. He calls the creature "Normandy Nessie" because he lives on Normandy Road.

The retired engineer said he first saw "Nessie" in April.

"His head come up out of the water, and then he rolled up in a double roll behind him and he was long he was huge," he said of that first sighting.

Sittlow said he has seen two of the creatures in the canal, one very large, and the other a bit smaller. He estimates the largest one is at least 30 feet long.

Sittlow set up a surveillance camera to record video if the creatures came back. He said his camera recorded "Nessie" three times since September, the latest Saturday.

He showed the video to a reporter. It shows a dark form swimming along the surface of the water. It appears to be about 30 feet long. Another clip shows the creature splashing in the water.

"I don't know what it is," he said.

When a reporter asked if he thought it was really a monster, he hedged.

"No, no, well, call a monster what you will, it's something different, it's something strange, it's something I've never seen in salt water," he stated.

Sittlow's account of what he saw is backed up by neighbor Maria VanAiken, 47, who said she saw the "monster" this summer while on her back porch.

"I looked up and I saw this like huge-looking creature," she said, adding that it wasn't a manatee or dolphin.

"This huge thing just came out of the water," she said.

Her husband saw the creature later.

When pressed, Sittlow backed off his sea monster theory, but not totally.

"This is a snake I guarantee you, or a serpent like thing that looks like a snake," he explained. He thinks it could be an anaconda or a python or "a mutation there of."

State wildlife officials who have seen Sittlow's video believe the creature is a manatee.

Sittlow disagrees. Whatever is in the canal is dangerous, he said, and he doesn't recommend swimming there until it's positively identified.

*sources: www2.tbo.com

Jellyfish swarm northward in warming world

KOKONOGI, Japan – A blood-orange blob the size of a small refrigerator emerged from the dark waters, its venomous tentacles trapped in a fishing net. Within minutes, hundreds more were being hauled up, a pulsating mass crowding out the catch of mackerel and sea bass.

The fishermen leaned into the nets, grunting and grumbling as they tossed the translucent jellyfish back into the bay, giants weighing up to 200 kilograms (450 pounds), marine invaders that are putting the men's livelihoods at risk.

The venom of the Nomura, the world's largest jellyfish, a creature up to 2 meters (6 feet) in diameter, can ruin a whole day's catch by tainting or killing fish stung when ensnared with them in the maze of nets here in northwest Japan's Wakasa Bay.

"Some fishermen have just stopped fishing," said Taiichiro Hamano, 67. "When you pull in the nets and see jellyfish, you get depressed."

This year's jellyfish swarm is one of the worst he has seen, Hamano said. Once considered a rarity occurring every 40 years, they are now an almost annual occurrence along several thousand kilometers (miles) of Japanese coast, and far beyond Japan.

Scientists believe climate change — the warming of oceans — has allowed some of the almost 2,000 jellyfish species to expand their ranges, appear earlier in the year and increase overall numbers, much as warming has helped ticks, bark beetles and other pests to spread to new latitudes.

The gelatinous seaborne creatures are blamed for decimating fishing industries in the Bering and Black seas, forcing the shutdown of seaside power and desalination plants in Japan, the Middle East and Africa, and terrorizing beachgoers worldwide, the U.S. National Science Foundation says.

A 2008 foundation study cited research estimating that people are stung 500,000 times every year — sometimes multiple times — in Chesapeake Bay on the U.S. East Coast, and 20 to 40 die each year in the Philippines from jellyfish stings.

In 2007, a salmon farm in Northern Ireland lost its more than 100,000 fish to an attack by the mauve stinger, a jellyfish normally known for stinging bathers in warm Mediterranean waters. Scientists cite its migration to colder Irish seas as evidence of global warming.

Increasingly polluted waters — off China, for example — boost growth of the microscopic plankton that "jellies" feed upon, while overfishing has eliminated many of the jellyfish's predators and cut down on competitors for plankton feed.

"These increases in jellyfish should be a warning sign that our oceans are stressed and unhealthy," said Lucas Brotz, a University of British Columbia researcher.

Here on the rocky Echizen coast, amid floodlights and the roar of generators, fishermen at Kokonogi's bustling port made quick work of the day's catch — packaging glistening fish and squid in Styrofoam boxes for shipment to market.

In rain jackets and hip waders, they crowded around a visitor to tell how the jellyfish have upended a way of life in which men worked fishing trawlers on the high seas in their younger days and later eased toward retirement by joining one of the cooperatives operating nets set in the bay.

It was a good living, they said, until the jellyfish began inundating the bay in 2002, sometimes numbering 500 million, reducing fish catches by 30 percent and slashing prices by half over concerns about quality.

Two nets in Echizen burst last month during a typhoon because of the sheer weight of the jellyfish, and off the east coast jelly-filled nets capsized a 10-ton trawler as its crew tried to pull them up. The three fishermen were rescued.

"We have been getting rid of jellyfish. But no matter how hard we try, the jellyfish keep coming and coming," said Fumio Oma, whose crew is out of work after their net broke under the weight of thousands of jellyfish. "We need the government's help to get rid of the jellyfish."

The invasions cost the industry up to 30 billion yen ($332 million) a year, and tens of thousands of fishermen have sought government compensation, said scientist Shin-ichi Uye, Japan's leading expert on the problem.

Hearing fishermen's pleas, Uye, who had been studying zooplankton, became obsessed with the little-studied Nomura's jellyfish, scientifically known as Nemopilema nomurai, which at its biggest looks like a giant mushroom trailing dozens of noodle-like tentacles.

"No one knew their life cycle, where they came from, where they reproduced," said Uye, 59. "This jellyfish was like an alien."

He artificially bred Nomura's jellyfish in his Hiroshima University lab, learning about their life cycle, growth rates and feeding habits. He traveled by ferry between China to Japan this year to confirm they were riding currents to Japanese waters.

He concluded China's coastal waters offered a perfect breeding ground: Agricultural and sewage runoff are spurring plankton growth, and fish catches are declining. The waters of the Yellow Sea, meanwhile, have warmed as much as 1.7 degrees C (3 degrees F) over the past quarter-century.

"The jellyfish are becoming more and more dominant," said Uye, as he sliced off samples of dead jellyfish on the deck of an Echizen fishing boat. "Their growth rates are quite amazing."

The slight, bespectacled scientist is unafraid of controversy, having lobbied his government tirelessly to help the fishermen, and angered Chinese colleagues by arguing their government must help solve the problem, comparing it to the effects of acid rain that reaches Japan from China.

"The Chinese people say they will think about this after they get rich, but it might be too late by then," he said.

A U.S. marine scientist, Jennifer Purcell of Western Washington University, has found a correlation between warming and jellyfish on a much larger scale, in at least 11 locations, including the Mediterranean and North seas, and Chesapeake and Narragansett bays.

"It's hard to deny that there is an effect from warming," Purcell said. "There keeps coming up again and again examples of jellyfish populations being high when it's warmer." Some tropical species, on the other hand, appear to decline when water temperatures rise too high.

Even if populations explode, their numbers may be limited in the long term by other factors, including food and currents. In a paper last year, researchers concluded jellyfish numbers in the Bering Sea — which by 2000 were 40 times higher than in 1982 — declined even as temperatures have hit record highs.

"They were still well ahead of their historic averages for that region," said co-author Lorenzo Ciannelli of Oregon State University. "But clearly jellyfish populations are not merely a function of water temperature."

Addressing the surge in jellyfish blooms in most places will require long-term fixes, such as introducing fishing quotas and pollution controls, as well as capping greenhouse gas emissions to control global warming, experts said.

In the short term, governments are left with few options other than warning bathers or bailing out cash-strapped fishermen. In Japan, the government is helping finance the purchase of newly designed nets, a layered system that snares jellyfish with one kind of net, allowing fish through to be caught in another.

Some entrepreneurs, meanwhile, are trying to cash in. One Japanese company is selling giant jellyfish ice cream, and another plans a pickled plum dip with chunks of giant jellyfish. But, though a popular delicacy, jellyfish isn't likely to replace sushi or other fish dishes on Asian menus anytime soon, in view of its time-consuming processing, heavy sodium overload and unappealing image.

*photo source & news source: news.yahoo.com