Playing with Google Earth is pretty popular in tech circles. One can snoop into all sorts of earthly matters from heaven’s perspective. Lester Haines at the Register reports on one of Google Earth-ers’ most al-time intriguing finds: a Chinese military installation at Huangyangtan features an astonshingly detailed 900x700m scale model of a very mountainous landscape.

The army of Googlers applied ther obsessive analytic skills and identified the model’s subject location: a disputed region of the China-India border.

The extraordinarily elaborate model was obviously painstakingly produced for some sort of military training. The Google General Staff College theorizes that the purpose may be to familiarize Chinese pilots with the landscape in preparation for some future conflict. Considering just how much trouble and expense the Chinese have gone to with this one, India had better be prepared for a renewal of Chinese pressure for concessions, backed up by military force.

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Hat tip to PJM.

For some inexplicable reason, this new advertisement by Sony announcing the availability of a white version of Sony’s Playstation Portable has provoked controversy.

This is the sort of thing which will one day amuse historians, who will chuckle over anecdotes demonstrating our era’s characteristic cringe over racial matters, in precisely the same way we are amused at the idea of prudish Victorians placing skirts on the legs of tables and pianos.

An alert neighbor snapped a number of photos of a six foot alligator clawing at the front door of Robert & Roslyn Loretta in Hilton Head, South Carolina. He missed the doorbell, but came awfully close.

The Lorettas believed the reptilian visitor was attracted by the smell of barbecuing chicken.

video

The Inquirer, a UK tech site, has a very alarming photo of a Dell notebook PC allegedly exploding at a conference in Japan.

AN INQUIRER READER attending a conference in Japan was sat just feet away from a laptop computer that suddenly exploded into flames, in what could have been a deadly accident.

Gaston, our astonished reader reports: “The damn thing was on fire and produced several explosions for more than five minutes”.

This story is suspiciously lacking in factual detail, but the Inquirer really does looks like a legitimate tech news and humor source. If they faked this photo, or misidentified the notebook’s brand, I would expect that Dell could, and would, sue the pants off them.

I looked at Dell’s Press Releases, and found nothing so far. It may be worth checking back later.

The dismal quality (“Little boxes made of ticky-tacky”) and mind-boggling prices of San Francisco area housing are famous. “They took the Earthly Paradise, and built New Jersey,” one appalled visitor recently remarked.

Ordinary people are completely priced out of this market, and the Sunday Chronicle reports the situation has inspired the traditional local activist response: Start a Web-Site!

Phil Zarboulas is mad as hell about Bay Area housing prices.

And he doesn’t want you to take it anymore.

What started as an open letter of frustration about the region’s exorbitant home values was reborn last month as www.boycotthousing.com, a Web site that urges people to stop buying Bay Area real estate, report overpriced properties and spread the word about cracked foundations, leaky roofs and rundown surroundings.

A software entrepreneur who was outbid several times during his two-year plus home search, Zarboulas admits he wants to hasten a slowdown in the market and thereby help regular folks (and himself) onto the home-ownership bandwagon.

Through the site — which seems a natural fit in the technology/real estate/advocacy-obsessed Bay Area — Zarboulas also hopes to educate overextended homeowners about the possible disadvantages of tapping equity that may not be real.

“There’s no fundamental reason why house prices are this high — it’s just a mentality,” Zarboulas, 40, said during a wide-ranging interview at a coffee shop in San Francisco. “We want to change that mentality.”

In a housing-strapped region with a population of nearly 7 million and growing, economists doubt Zarboulas’ site will have a measurable effect — not to mention the difficulty of organizing any kind of boycott on something as fragmented as a market with tens of thousands of housing sales each year.

But if even a relatively small slice of those sales are affected by his grassroots effort, Zarboulas is convinced a sense of reason could return to a market gone haywire.

Since its introduction in mid-May, almost 24,000 have visited the site and nearly 1,000 have signed up to voluntarily avoid purchasing a home in the Bay Area for some period, ranging from three months to more than a year.

Obviously, starting web-sites, signing petitions, even linking arms and singing Kumbaya, is not going to bring down Bay area home prices.

What would is what the Bay Area moonbat population would never consider for a New York minute: reducing the San Bruno Mountain-sized pile of building regulations, and opening up some of vast reservoir of safely squirreled-away “open space” where no one is permitted to build.

Unfortunately, the drastic shortage drives prices of existing homes into the stratosphere (Fido’s doghouse would go for $500K if it were on the Peninsula), and creates a gloating constituency of existing homeowners. “I’m on board, Captain, pull the ladder up,” is the real motto of the Golden State.

The SF Peninsula is not an enormously large place, but three preservation organizations alone have taken 125,000 acres, 200 square miles, of land out of circulation.

Peninsula Open Space Trust 55,000 acres

Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District 50,000 acres

Peninsula Watershed 23,000 acres

Jack, a 15lb (7kg), (declawed!) ginger tabby is a trifle possessive of his yard in West Milford, New Jersey.

A neighbor discovered Jack sitting on the ground regarding a black bear perched high above in a tree. She first thought Jack was merely watching. But when that bear tried to descend 15 minutes later, to her astonishment, the feisty house cat ran him right up another tree.

Jack’s owner had to call him into the house in order to allow the terrified bruin to make a hasty escape.

“He doesn’t want anybody in his yard,” said proud owner Donna Dickey.

Star-Ledger

The Center for Disease Control is about to begin investigating a possibly imaginary disease called Morgellons, the first modern case of which was identified by a mother in a small town in Southwestern, Pennsylvania on the basis of a disease description in a 1690 monograph by Sir Thomas Browne.

Not altogether surprisingly, the San Francisco Bay Area is a hotbed of Morgellons affliction.

Morgellons Research Foundation

West Virginia breeds some pretty cool-headed pilots like Chuck Yaeger, and Monty Coles. FoxNews reports:

Monty Coles was 3,000 feet in the air when he discovered a stowaway peeking out at him from the plane’s instrument panel — a 4 1/2-foot black snake.

Coles had left Charleston earlier for a leisurely flight over the West Virginia countryside last Saturday in his Piper Cherokee and was preparing to land in Gallipolis, Ohio, when the snake revealed itself.

“Nothing in any of the manuals ever described anything like this,” the 62-year-old Cross Lanes resident said. But the advice given 25 years earlier from his flight instructor immediately came to mind: “No matter what happens, fly the plane.”

An attempt to swat the snake only resulted in it falling to Coles’ feet under the rudder pedals. It then darted to the other side of the cockpit.

While maintaining control of the single-engine plane with one hand, Coles grabbed the reptile behind its head with his other.

“There was no way I was letting that thing go. It coiled all around my arm, and its tail grabbed hold of a lever on the floor and started pulling,” Coles said.

The Khaleej Times reports that 30 year old Bimbala Das in a ceremony held near Bhubaneshwar in the state of Orissa was married last Wednesday to a cobra residing in a nearby ant hill. The snake was not actually present, and a brass proxy was used in the ceremony.

One wonders if anyone had ever actually determined the gender of the snake.

Some readers may recall the British woman who married a dolphin last December in Israel.

A left-wing web-site has posted a 20 minute video of a stuttering supposed Army Ranger named Jesse MacBeth, who is peddling stories of “killing 30-40 women and children a night,” and all sorts of other atrocities.

Mudville Gazette noted these discrepancies:

1. Special Forces Combat Patch (Wrong)
2. Two “Tabs” sewn above SF patch (Wrong- Only One)
3. No Ranger Tab
4. No Airborne Wings
5. No Unit Crest
6. No Sewn on Rank
7. No One in the Army rolls their sleeves like that.
Bonus: 8. Mustache is out of regulation by extending past the corner of the mouth.

Jeff Goldstein has collected a lot of debunking information: we now know he works in a Wendy’s and fancies himself a socialist revolutionary.

Volunteers recently performing a clean-up on the summit of Ben Nevis, the 4,418ft highest peak in Britain, were surprised to discover a baby grand piano on the top of the mountain. An appeal for information on how it got there was carried widely by the British press.

And an explanation has been forthcoming. 15 moving men from Dundee carried the piano to the top in 1986 as a fund raising stunt to benefit cystic fibrosis research. They were tired out, after lugging it up, and decided not to bring it back down.

It’s a good policy to avoid some American cities run by corrupt democrat party machines with incompetent police departments full of officers hired on the basis of political considerations. WBAL reports the case of a Virginia couple who attended a baseball game in Baltimore, got lost, asked a police officer for directions, and were arrested.

Baltimore City police arrested a Virginia couple over the weekend after they asked an officer for directions.

WBAL-TV 11 News I-Team reporter David Collins said Joshua Kelly and Llara Brook, of Chantilly, Va., got lost leaving an Orioles game on Saturday. Collins reported a city officer arrested them for trespassing on a public street while they were asking for directions .

“In jail for eight hours — sleeping on a concrete floor next to a toilet,” Kelly said.

“It was a nightmare,” Brook said. “I was in there thinking I was just dreaming and waiting to wake up.”

This kind of thing is no joke. American city jails are unsanitary and dangerous places, where detainees are commonly housed in unsupervised conditions at the mercy of other prisoners.