I think this takes the #1 spot for me as Most Anticipated Documentary.. EVAR - supposedly irrefutable evidence has been found that the bones of Jesus - yes, the Jesus - and his family have been found in a tomb in Israel!

When my brother told me this I did a little dance of joy.  We could be just days away from disproving the notion that Jesus flew away into the sky, one of several notions (along with magic boxes that melted people’s faces in Indy Jones, and prophets that.. well, I have no idea what magic tricks Mohammed supposedly did) that have stifled human progress and murdered countless millions for millenia.  Party time!  Statistical analysis of the contents of the tomb put it at about 600 to 1 that it’s Jesus and crew. 

And who’s responsible for bringing us this documentary?  James Cameron!  I can’t wait to see the special effects.  Mark your calendars for March 4th, people.  This documentary could really start a shit storm.

—–

File this under “Did you not see this coming?”:  A priest in Romania has just been sentenced to 14 years for killing a nun during an exorcism.

Four nuns also received jail sentences.

Now, if this guy had simply pulled a person off the street and starved them to death, this would be a terrible tragedy.  But Christ, shouldn’t death by exorcism just be considered an occupational hazard for an orthodox nun?  Alaska king crab fishermen are engaged in a highly dangerous job - they could make a lot of money in a month’s worth of work, or could die by drowning in the North Pacific.  They know and accept these odds.  The state certainly doesn’t bring charges against the boat captain for manslaughter.

We are dealing with the same damn thing here.  When you willingly enter into a religion, you are signing up for the whole shebang.  Your upside is having that warm fuzzy feeling that when you die you get a harp and wings, 70 virgins, etc.  Your downside is that you may exorcised, burned as a witch, have a bomb strapped to your chest, etc.  Occupational hazard!  I would not doubt that the priest and nuns truly believed they were helping to save the soul of a friend and fellow nun.  My brain doesn’t generally operate in “batshit crazy” mode, so I can’t be sure, but I’m guessing that the priest really thought he was doing something good for a person that he loved as a “child and servant of God” who was in the clutches of the Devil.  Shouldn’t this guy get a medal or something?

I saw no crime committed here.  Believing in stupid stuff is not a crime (unfortunately).  If you live by the cult, you have to be prepared to die by the cult.

By the way, I totally figured out who the priest really is.

—–

This story is just amazing.  A German woman was training for the World Paragliding Championships when she got caught in a thunderstorm. 

The girl got sucked up 32,612 feet - higher than Mt. Everest - where she encountered orange-sized hail and temperatures around -58 degrees F.  She became encased in ice and went unconscious, only to be later released by the storm, regain consciousness, and land her glider safely.

Imagine how psyched out her competition is!  Jeeezus.  That ride’s got to be worth at least an honorary gold in the Freestyle event.

Oh and in case you don’t read the whole article, I’ll give you the most awesomest sentence in the whole thing:

A British team member earlier this month survived an attack by two wild eagles which sent her canopy plummeting while flying in the same area ahead of the championships.

Getting tossed into the upper atmosphere.  Attacks by wild eagles.  I think we can safely assume that God hates paragliders.

—–

This is one of those rare conferences that might be worth a day of your life. If you don’t know PSFK, you should by now. Here is a little more on them:

PSFK is one of the world’s most forward thinking innovation teams. Managed since 2003 by Piers Fawkes in New York and Simon King in London, PSFK is network of experts from across the globe who share the same energy, enthusiasm and wonder. They really seem to have the pulse of culture and how to be part of it. The image below will take you to the conference details. On that page, you will see who is attending and covering the event. It’s very impressive.

Unfortunately I can’t make this one but if you live in New York or will be there when the conference is on, please take the time and go.

—–

This is my first New Year in Seattle. It has been one hell of a year and I can’t think of a better way to end it and bring in the new than this.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that the Space Needle a blaze with fireworks for the bringing in of the new year. It was a beautiful display that gave me yet another reason to be proud to be in the Pacific Northwest.

This is a capture from the local news King 5.

—–

We have posted about Samsung a ton, and with good reason, they are making great stuff.

This is for the Cingular service using the BlackJack smartphone.

I first saw the spot on a HDTV and couldn’t tell from the corner of my eye if it was 100% CGI but when I brought it into Vegas 7 and brightened it up, it was obviously heavy CGI.

Very cool motion and effects. 

If anyone out there does this kinda work and wants to show it off here on DHADM, just email us ( ), we will post it as long as it’s not total crap. It doesn’t have to be a commercial, any cool animation or effects you want to show off would be fine.

If you want to see the other Samsung BlackJack spot we posted click it: Cingular | Samsung BlackJack

—–

As if the Republicans haven’t had enough trouble this election year, your diligent staff - (can we call ourselves a “staff”?) - okay, your diligent group of people with access to the DHADM servers have uncovered yet another shocking scandal!  Jim Talent (running for re-election to the Senate in Missouri) is deceased and resurrected from the dead (I shall assume by unHoly forces)!  It doesn’t get any bigger than this, folks!

Senator Talent	Talent circa 1940, with stylish fedora

As is clearly evident from the photos, these are the same men.  But how can this be?  For just this morning, I received an unmarked, brown envelope on my desk with a DVD containing the following, never-before-seen (except, I would imagine, for the undercover operative who gave it to me.. and perhaps his family) footage.  It’s only 30 seconds and a bit grainy… but secrety, conspiracy type tapes usually are, right?  I mean, have you ever seen a full 60-minute close-up feature of Bigfoot?  Any “Pimp My Ride”-style 360-degree panoramics of a UFO?  But I digress - here’s the footage I received this morning (presumably from a fundraiser or something).

No more island retreats for the Republican National Convention.

There you have it, people.  Jim Talent passed away in 1942 and has been resurrected by what I can only assume to be dark forces.  Now, whereas being controlled by dark forces does not make you ineligible for elected office (in fact, it helps), being deceased does.  Expect this to be hitting all the major networks tomorrow.  But you heard it here first.  Show us your right palm, Jim!  Show us your palm!!

Believe it or not, this post was originally just going to be links to election maps, predictions, etc.  I got a bit sidetracked.  Here’s some cool election-tracking sites:

NY Times

Electoral-Vote

CNN analysis

—–

You like us. We like you. Do us a favor and fill out this quick survey.



Show some love, so we can pay for our servers and cover some time. Thanks.

—–

As you may know, we did a solid week of Auto-Only posts. 30 of them to be exact.

We did this for several reasons:

1. We had a ton of auto content.

2. Wanted to see if readers enjoyed specifc content

3. To see if our traffic number went up based on focused content.

Here are the results.

Unique visitors 12,390

Visits 18,589

Pages 88,747

Hits 241,845

Bandwidth 33.42 GB

That’s about a 15-20% jump from last week compared to others. Thank you everyone that spent time with us last week and we look forward to seeing you again this week.

Take care, DS.

—–

Sorry for the downtime today, but it was for good reason. DHADM and Transbuddha are sister sites that share more than content but also some of the pipe that allows us to post lots of video content.

It was because of a hugely successful clip that got picked up by . We should be good for now…millions of concurrent hits can be hard to manage. 

Here is the post over on Transbuddha and props to our web masters and Server Beach:

Sorry folks, the Let’s Dance clip got featured on Yahoo’s 9, and as you might expect, the servers got utterly killed by http requests.  Thankfully our hosting service, ServerBeach, and our crack team of server monkeys got us back up and running.  It might be a little slow for a while, but bear with it.

And to you Yahoo visitors, welcome to Transbuddha.

—–