Ben Fogle and his glorious beard

I do like his beard. Ben seems like a great guy.....well he has to be really growing a beard that that....well done Ben.

Brookfield

I do enjoy going to brookfield and seein david beckham. I am a member of Brookfield gym and leisure center. Nice place it was busy actually Tuesday.

Juggling

Juggling is a physical human skill involving the movement of one or more objects, usually through the air, for entertainment (see object manipulation). The most recognizable form of juggling is toss juggling, where the juggler throws objects through the air. Jugglers often refer to the objects they juggle as props. The most common props are balls, beanbags, rings, clubs, and bouncing balls. Some performers use dramatic objects such as chainsaws, knives and fire torches. The term juggling can also refer to other prop-based circus skills such as diabolo, devil sticks, poi, cigar box manipulation, fire-dancing, contact juggling, hooping and hat manipulation.

The word juggling derives from the Middle English jogelen to entertain by performing tricks, in turn from the French jongleur and the Old French jogler. There is also the Late Latin form joculare of Latin joculari, meaning to jest. "Juggling" has come to mean, colloquially, any activity which requires a constant refocusing of one's attention from an overall goal to multiple subsidiary tasks, for example "Juggling Work and Family", the title of a PBS documentary, This colloquial meaning is similar to the non-computer use of the word multitasking.

Shoes

A shoe is an item of footwear evolved at first to protect the human foot and later, additionally, as an item of decoration in itself. The foot contains more bones than any other single part of the body, and has evolved over hundreds of thousands of years in relation to vastly varied terrain and climatic conditions. Together with the proprioceptive system, it is what makes possible balance and ambulation.

Most of the time there have been people, most people have not worn shoes. Until recent years, shoes were not worn by most of the world's population—largely because they could not afford them. Only with the advent of mass production, making available for the first time the cheap flip-flop-type sandal, for example, has shoe-wearing become more or less universal.

Appearance and design have varied enormously through time, and from culture to culture. They may, for example, have very high heels or no heels at all. Contemporary footwear varies in style, complexity and cost, from the most basic sandal, via high fashion shoes for women sometimes costing thousands of dollars a pair, through to complex boots specially designed for mountaineering or skiing. Shoes have traditionally been made from leather, wood or canvas, but are increasingly made from rubber, plastics and other petrochemical-derived materials.

Xbox 360

The Xbox 360 is the second video game console produced by Microsoft, and the successor to the Xbox. The Xbox 360 competes with Sony's PlayStation 3 and Nintendo's Wii as part of the seventh generation of video game consoles. The integrated Xbox Live service allows players to compete online and download content such as arcade games, game demos, trailers, TV shows, and movies.

The Xbox 360 was officially unveiled on MTV on May 12, 2005, with detailed launch and game information divulged later that month at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3). The console sold out completely at the release in all regions except in Japan,^[3][4][5] and, as of January 5, 2009, 28 million units have been sold worldwide according to Microsoft.^[1] The Xbox 360 is available in three configurations: the "Arcade", the "Xbox 360", and the "Elite" console, each with its own selection of accessories.

Digital Pirates Winning Battle With Studios

On the day last July when “The Dark Knight” arrived in theaters, Warner Brothers was ready with an ambitious antipiracy campaign that involved months of planning and steps to monitor each physical copy of the film.

A high-quality streaming video version of "Slumdog Millionaire" as seen on a secondary site reached through a "link farm" featuring pirated movies.

The campaign failed miserably. By the end of the year, illegal copies of the Batman movie had been downloaded more than seven million times around the world, according to the media measurement firm BigChampagne, turning it into a visible symbol of Hollywood’s helplessness against the growing problem of online video piracy.

The culprits, in this case, are the anonymous pirates who put the film online and enabled millions of Internet users to view it. Because of widely available broadband access and a new wave of streaming sites, it has become surprisingly easy to watch pirated video online — a troubling development for entertainment executives and copyright lawyers.

Hollywood may at last be having its Napster moment — struggling against the video version of the digital looting that capsized the music business. Media companies say that piracy — some prefer to call it “digital theft” to emphasize the criminal nature of the act — is an increasingly mainstream pursuit. At the same time, DVD sales, a huge source of revenue for film studios, are sagging. In 2008, DVD shipments dropped to their lowest levels in five years. Executives worry that the economic downturn will persuade more users to watch stolen shows and movies.

“Young people, in particular, conclude that if it’s so easy, it can’t be wrong,” said Richard Cotton, the general counsel for NBC Universal.

People have swapped illegal copies of songs, television shows and movies on the Internet for years. The slow download process, often using a peer-to-peer technology called BitTorrent, required patience and a modicum of sophistication by users. Now, users do not even have to download. Using a search engine, anyone can find free copies of movies, still in theaters, in a matter of minutes. Classic TV, like every “Seinfeld” episode ever produced, is also free for the streaming. Some of these digital copies are derived from bootlegs, while others are replicas of the advance review videos that studios send out before a release.

TorrentFreak.com, a Web site based in Germany that tracks which shows are most downloaded, estimates that each episode of “Heroes,” a series on NBC, is downloaded five million times, representing a substantial loss for the network. (On TV, “Heroes” averages 10 million American viewers each week).

A wave of streaming sites, which allow people to start watching video immediately without transferring a full copy of the movie or show to their hard drive, are making it easier than ever to watch free Hollywood content online. Many of these sites are located in countries with lackluster piracy enforcement efforts, like China, and are hard to monitor, so media companies do not have a clear sense of how much content is being stolen.

But many industry experts say the practice is becoming much more prevalent. “Streaming has gotten efficient and cheap enough and it gives users more control than downloads do. This is where piracy is headed,” said James L. McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research. “Consumers are under the impression that everything they want to watch should be easily streamable.”

Some of the first fights over video piracy on the Internet involved YouTube, the Google-owned Web site that introduced many people to streaming. Some legal disputes between YouTube and copyright owners remain, most notably a $1 billion lawsuit filed by Viacom, but the landscape “has improved markedly,” Mr. Cotton said. YouTube uses filters and digital flags to weed out illegal content.

But if media companies are winning the battle against illegal video clips, they are losing the battle over illicit copies of full-length TV episodes and films. The Motion Picture Association of America says that illegal downloads and streams are now responsible for about 40 percent of the revenue the industry loses annually as a result of piracy.

“It is becoming, among some demographics, a very mainstream behavior,” said Eric Garland, the chief executive of BigChampagne.

The files are surprisingly easy to find, partly because of efforts by people like Mohy Mir, the 23-year-old founder of the Toronto based video streaming site SuperNova Tube. The site, run by Mr. Mir and one other employee, allows anyone to post a video clip of any length. As the site has grown more popular, SuperNova Tube has become a repository for copyrighted content. On a recent day, the new movies “Paul Blart: Mall Cop” and “Taken” could easily be found on the site by following links from other sites, called “link farms,” which guide users to secret stashes of copyrighted content spread around the Web.

Mr. Mir says he did not know these files were there and that his company promptly responds to any request from major rights- holders. He also says that piracy is actually his largest problem — advertisers flee when they are alerted to infringing material — and that he is constantly removing files at the request of Hollywood studios.

His reluctance is seemingly belied by his site’s name, which is based on the popular SuperNova BitTorrent hub, and its slogan: “We Work with uploaders, not against them.”

The piracy problem, however, does seem to weigh on him. He removed a copy of the movie “Twilight” from his site after a reporter pointed it out to him recently. “I think about getting sued every day. If that happens it will definitely take us out of business,” he said.

Mr. Mir has reason for concern. In December, the motion picture association sued three Web sites that it said were facilitating copyright infringement by identifying and indexing links to pirated material around the Web.

John Malcolm, the association’s director of worldwide antipiracy operations, said that although the group does not sue individuals for watching pirated videos, other lawsuits against Web sites are forthcoming, and he acknowledged that the challenge is stiff.

“There are a lot of very technologically sophisticated people out there who are very good at this and very good at hiding,” Mr. Malcolm said. “We have limited resources to bring to the fight.”

With so much pirated material online, Hollywood is turning to technological solutions. Perhaps most important, media companies are learning from the music industry’s mistakes and trying to avert broader adoption of piracy techniques. The No. 1 lesson: provide the video on the platform that users want it.

Mark Ishikawa, BayTSP’s founder and chief executive, sees a correlation between the availability of content through traditional legal channels and their popularity on pirate networks.

“When DVD releases are postponed, demand always goes up, because people don’t have an authorized channel to buy,” he said.

Partly in response to the piracy problem, a cornucopia of video Web sites now feature the latest episodes of virtually every broadcast TV show. Movie studios are experimenting with video-on-demand releases and other ways to offer films on demand. Legal alternatives, the companies hope, will stifle the stealing. The music industry, by comparison, waited years to provide legal options for online listeners.

“That’s how you start to marginalize piracy — not just by using the stick, but by using the carrot,” Mr. Garland said.

David Attenborough's Tv documentries

Foremost among Attenborough's TV documentary work as writer and presenter is the "Life" series, which begins with the trilogy: Life on Earth (1979), The Living Planet (1984) and The Trials of Life (1990). These examine the world's organisms from the viewpoints of taxonomy, ecology and stages of life respectively.

They were followed by more specialised surveys: Life in the Freezer (about Antarctica; 1993), The Private Life of Plants (1995), The Life of Birds (1998), The Life of Mammals (2002), Life in the Undergrowth (2005) and Life in Cold Blood (2008). The 'Life' series as a whole comprises 79 programmes.

Attenborough has also written and/or presented other shorter productions. One of the first after his return to programme-making was The Tribal Eye (1975), which enabled him to expand on his interest in tribal art. Others include The First Eden (1987), about man's relationship with the natural habitats of the Mediterranean, and Lost Worlds, Vanished Lives (1989), which demonstrated Attenborough's passion for discovering fossils. In 2000, State of the Planet examined the environmental crisis that threatens the ecology of the Earth. The naturalist also narrated two other significant series: The Blue Planet (2001) and the British version of Planet Earth (2006) (which in its American cable television edition was narrated by actress Sigourney Weaver). The latter is the first natural history series to be made entirely in high-definition.

In May–June 2006, the BBC broadcast a major two-part environmental documentary as part of its "Climate Chaos" season of programmes on global warming. In Are We Changing Planet Earth? and Can We Save Planet Earth?, Attenborough investigated the subject and put forward some potential solutions. He returned to the locations of some of his past productions and discovered the effect that climate change has had on them. These two programmes were released on DVD under the title The Truth About Climate Change on 23 June 2008.

In 2007, Attenborough presented "Sharing Planet Earth", the first programme in a series of documentaries entitled Saving Planet Earth. Again he used footage from his previous series to illustrate the impact that mankind has had on the planet. "Sharing Planet Earth" was broadcast on 24 June 2007.

Life in Cold Blood is Attenborough's last major series. In an interview to promote it, he stated:

The evolutionary history is finished. The endeavour is complete. If you'd asked me 20 years ago whether we'd be attempting such a mammoth task, I'd have said 'Don't be ridiculous'. These programmes tell a particular story and I'm sure others will come along and tell it much better than I did, but I do hope that if people watch it in 50 years' time, it will still have something to say about the world we live in.

However, in subsequent interviews with Radio Times, Parkinson and on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross, he said that he did not intend to retire completely and would probably continue to make occasional one-off programmes. The most recent documentary, Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life (in which he makes a case for the science of evolution), was broadcast on Sunday 1 February 2009 at 9:00 pm on BBC One.

Although Attenborough's documentaries have attained immense popularity in the United States, several have never been made available on DVD in NTSC format, most notably those that cast doubt upon religious or politically conservative positions. These include:

• Life on Earth, which examines the evidence for evolution.
• State of the Planet
• The Truth About Climate Change

eh.......another post this is about the grizzly bear

Male grizzly bears can reach and stand 2.44 meters (8 ft) tall on their hind legs; the females are on average 38% smaller.[1] This sexual dimorphism suggests that size is an important factor in the male's ability to successfully compete for and attract breeding opportunities. Their coloring ranges widely across geographic areas, from blond to deep brown or red. The grizzly has a large hump over the shoulders, which is a muscle mass used to power the forelimbs in digging. The hind legs are more powerful, however. The muscles in the lower legs provide enough strength for the bear to stand up and even walk short distances on its hind legs, giving it a better view of its surroundings. The head is large and round with a concave facial profile. In spite of their massive size, these bears can run at speeds of up to 40 kilometers per hour (25 miles per hour). However, they are slower running downhill rather than uphill because of the large hump of muscle over the shoulders.


A grizzly bear skullGrizzlies can be distinguished from most other brown bear subspecies by their proportionately longer claws and cranial profile which resembles that of the polar bear.[2] Compared to other North American brown bear subspecies, a grizzly's pelt is silver tipped and is smaller in size. This size difference is due to the lesser availability of food in the grizzlies landlocked habitats.[3] They are similar in size, color and behavior to the Siberian Brown Bear

Manchester United F.C.

Manchester United Football Club is an English football club, based at Old Trafford in Trafford, Greater Manchester, and is one of the most popular football clubs in the world, with over 330 million supporters worldwide – almost 5% of the world's population. The club was a founding member of the Premier League in 1992, and has played in the top division of English football since 1938, with the exception of the 1974–75 season. Average attendances at the club have been higher than any other team in English football for all but six seasons since 1964–65.

Manchester United are the reigning English, European, and World Champions having won the 2007–08 Premier League, the 2007–08 UEFA Champions League, and the 2008 FIFA Club World Cup. The club is the second most successful in the history of English football and by far the most successful of recent times, having won 20 major honours since the start of Alex Ferguson's reign as manager in November 1986. In 1968, they became the first English club to win the European Cup, beating Benfica 4–1. They won a second European Cup as part of an unprecedented Treble in 1999, before winning their third in 2008, 40 years almost to the day after their first. The club also holds the record for the most FA Cup titles with 11.

Since the late 1990s, the club has been one of the richest in the world with the highest revenue of any football club,^[9] and is currently ranked as the richest and most valuable club in any sport, with an estimated value of £897 million (€1.333 billion / $1.8 billion) as of September 2008. Manchester United was a founding member of the now defunct G-14 group of Europe's leading football clubs, and its replacement, the European Club Association.

Alex Ferguson has been manager of the club since 6 November 1986, joining from Aberdeen after the sacking of Ron Atkinson. The current club captain is Gary Neville, who succeeded Roy Keane in November 2005.

Charles Darwin

By the start of 1856, Darwin was investigating whether eggs and seeds could survive travel across seawater to spread species across oceans. Hooker increasingly doubted the traditional view that species were fixed, but their young friend Thomas Henry Huxley was firmly against evolution. Lyell was intrigued by Darwin’s speculations without realising their extent. When he read a paper by Alfred Russel Wallace on the Introduction of species, he saw similarities with Darwin’s thoughts and urged him to publish to establish precedence. Though Darwin saw no threat, he began work on a short paper. Finding answers to difficult questions held him up repeatedly, and he expanded his plans to a “big book on species” titled Natural Selection. He continued his researches, obtaining information and specimens from naturalists worldwide including Wallace who was working in Borneo. The American botanist Asa Gray showed similar interests, and on 5 September 1857 Darwin sent Gray a detailed outline of his ideas including an abstract of Natural Selection. In December, Darwin received a letter from Wallace asking if the book would examine human origins. He responded that he would avoid that subject, “so surrounded with prejudices”, while encouraging Wallace’s theorising and adding that “I go much further than you.”

Darwin’s book was half way when, on 18 June 1858, he received a paper from Wallace describing natural selection. Shocked that he had been “forestalled”, Darwin sent it on to Lyell, as requested, and, though Wallace had not asked for publication, he suggested he would send it to any journal that Wallace chose. His family was in crisis with children in the village dying of scarlet fever, and he put matters in the hands of Lyell and Hooker. They decided on a joint presentation at the Linnean Society on 1 July of On the Tendency of Species to form Varieties; and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection; how" ever, Darwin’s baby son died of the scarlet fever and he was too distraught to attend.

There was little immediate attention to this announcement of the theory; after the paper was published in the August journal of the society, it was reprinted in several magazines and there were some reviews and letters, but the president of the Linnean remarked in May 1859 that the year had not been marked by any revolutionary discoveries. Only one review rankled enough for Darwin to recall it later; Professor Samuel Haughton of Dublin claimed that “all that was new in them was false, and what was true was old." Darwin struggled for thirteen months to produce an abstract of his “big book”, suffering from ill health but getting constant encouragement from his scientific friends. Lyell arranged to have it published by John Murray.

On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (usually abbreviated to On the Origin of Species) proved unexpectedly popular, with the entire stock of 1,250 copies oversubscribed when it went on sale to booksellers on 22 November 1859. In the book, Darwin set out “one long argument” of detailed observations, inferences and consideration of anticipated objections. His only allusion to human evolution was the understatement that “light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history”. His theory is simply stated in the introduction:

As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected. From the strong principle of inheritance, any selected variety will tend to propagate its new and modified form.

He put a strong case for common descent, but avoided the then controversial term “evolution”, and at the end of the book concluded that;

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.