Microsoft Whacks the Wii: A First Look

By Lev Grossman Tuesday, Jun. 02, 2009

Let’s just admit it: the Nintendo people are total geniuses. I was one of the first journalists to see the Wii, in Kyoto in the spring of 2006. I even tried it out. I played fake mime-tennis. I caught a virtual fish by casting with the Wii controller. I did a little dance and watched a little guy do a little dance on the screen. At the time my thoughts were as follows: 1) Technologically speaking, this is a pretty amazing hack; 2) too bad the graphics suck; and 3) nobody will buy this ever. And 4) at least I got a free trip to Japan. And this was even before they told me the name.

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Now the Nintendo folks have sold about as many Wiis as Microsoft and Sony have sold Xbox 360s and PlayStation 3s put together. They are geniuses.

The Microsoft people may or may not be geniuses, but they’re definitely geniuses at figuring out who the geniuses in the room are and then doing what they’re doing. Today at E3, Microsoft announced a new technology that, like the Wii, uses motion-sensing to control video games. But it may just be better than the Wii. In fact it may just kill the Wii. (Read “Why Video Games Are an Excellent Economic Indicator.”)

The Xbox 360 is a great machine. Hard-core gamers like it because it’s got decent graphics and a great online service and it’s developer-friendly, so there are lots of good games for it. But to compete seriously with the Wii, the Xbox has to expand outside the hard-core gaming scene too. It needs casual gamers, and that’s where it has a problem. Non-hard-core gamers have trouble using the Xbox controller. It has two joysticks, two triggers, two bumper buttons and a bunch of other buttons besides. It takes time to learn. Their little thumbs get all confused. The Wii isn’t like that: you just wave it like Harry Potter and you’re golden.

If it had really tried to, Microsoft probably could have come up with a decent knockoff of the Wii controller. But instead they — meaning Don Mattrick, the head of Microsoft’s interactive-entertainment division and the former head of Electronic Arts — decided that instead of imitating Nintendo, Microsoft would try to leapfrog past Nintendo. “We did explore whether we thought a motion-based controller was a true next step or a transition step,” Mattrick says. “And for us, we decided it was a transition step.” So about 18 months ago he started up Project Natal.

Microsoft tends to name its internal projects after cities. Natal is a city in Brazil, which is where Alex Kipman, one of the key engineers on Project Natal, comes from. What Mattrick and Kipman decided to try to do was to get rid of the controller altogether. They wanted a technology that would enable a gamer to control the game just by moving his or her arms and legs and other body parts. The gamer would become the controller.

This has actually been tried before, with peripherals like the Sony EyeToy. The problem with the Sony EyeToy and its ilk was that they were lame. They didn’t track your motions very well, or precisely, and there were no good games for them. That’s not surprising, because building a system of this kind is a very hard technological problem. But Microsoft’s Xbox division has a somewhat different corporate culture than the rest of the company — it’s nimbler and friendlier to innovation — and Kipman and his colleagues are extremely clever. Which is good, because they were going to have to innovate like hell to make this work.

What they came up with is a kind of self-contained module that you add onto your Xbox 360. It has a video camera in it that tracks where your body is and what you’re doing with it. It also has a monochrome camera (it works with infrared) that reads depth — how far away your body and its component parts are — and a highly specialized microphone that can pick up voice commands. Along with all this hardware, it’s got a ton of software that tells the Xbox how to find your body’s various joints (it tracks 48 of them), how to keep track of multiple players at the same time, how to tell your Hawaiian shirt apart from the colorful wallpaper behind you, and so on. Microsoft even did an acoustic study of living rooms, so Project Natal can tell when you’re talking, when your buddies are talking and when somebody in the game is talking, so it knows whom to take voice commands from.

The result is … impressive. You start getting impressed when you walk in front of the thing and it immediately recognizes your face and logs you in. Very Star Trek. A few months ago Microsoft demoed Project Natal for Steven Spielberg, who in addition to directing movies designs video games, including Medal of Honor and the Wii title Boom Blox. He’s one of the few movie people who really gets games as an insider, and Microsoft was looking for his blessing. He gave it. “The technology recognized me as a full person,” he says. “It identified me, my legs, my arms, all of my movements, not just my wrists and my fists, and my thumbs, which is the current state of the art. This recognized my entire person and in a way accepted all of me as a competitor inside the gamespace.” (See the 10 worst video-game movies of all time. )

Let the games begin. I had a chance to play a simple dodgeball-type game called Ricochet, in which you just punch and kick and head balls at a three-dimensional wall. It’s weird to be playing a game with nothing in your hands — if you’ve ever played a theremin, the sensation of playing with Project Natal is not dissimilar. It’s spooky. But it’s also very immersive. When a ball comes bounding at your head and you butt it back with your forehead, you can almost feel the smack of it against your skin. “It was the most tactile experience I’ve had so far in a gaming space,” Spielberg says. “I got a sense that I was inside the space more than I have on any other platform.”

Kipman also showed me a version of Burnout that had been set up to work with Project Natal. Burnout is a serious game, not just a tech demo — it’s a polished, fast-paced racing game with high-end graphics, and I happen to have played a lot of it. With Project Natal, instead of using a joystick, you steer by holding your hands up in the air like you’re gripping a steering wheel. To hit the gas, you move your foot forward along the floor. To brake, you move it back. To trigger the turbo boost, you do a gear-shifting, fist-pumping movement with your right arm. Awesome.

It takes a few minutes to get the hang of it. You tend to oversteer, since you can’t quite believe this thing is going to pick up your movements, so you exaggerate them. But soon you start to trust it, because it does actually work. I couldn’t detect any significant latency. And there’s definitely an extra edge to playing a game with nothing between you and the screen but your clenched, white-knuckled fists. I’m a hard-core gamer, so I’m not the person Project Natal is targeting. I love my controller as it is. But the appeal of Project Natal is real. You could compare it to the difference between regular movies and 3-D movies: it puts you in the action in a way that nothing else could.

Of course, the success of Project Natal ultimately depends on whether developers embrace it and write decent games for it. Today game developers all over the world have got their little Project Natal starter kits, and it’s up to them to figure out what this stuff is good for. I saw a demo cooked up by Peter Molyneux (Black & White, Fable) in which you chat with a realistic-looking little boy. He recognizes your face and what color your clothes are, and he follows you with his eyes. If you walk over to a pond, you can ripple the water by moving your fingers across it. If you lean over it, you see your reflection. Freaky. “I think it’s the next step after Wii,” Spielberg says. “The Wii platform is totally engaging and awe-inspiring. But this is one step beyond that.”

This one is comes from CNN. You know how Jesus preached all that do unto others stuff. You know how Christians love to spout Jesus’ word to anyone who will listen. Well apparently the more people go to church to hear the “good word”, the more likely they are to disregard it completely and support torture.

WASHINGTON (CNN) — The more often Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support the torture of suspected terrorists, according to a new survey.

The Washington Region Religious Campaign Against Torture rallied on Capitol Hill in March 2008.

More than half of people who attend services at least once a week — 54 percent — said the use of torture against suspected terrorists is “often” or “sometimes” justified. Only 42 percent of people who “seldom or never” go to services agreed, according to the analysis released Wednesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

White evangelical Protestants were the religious group most likely to say torture is often or sometimes justified — more than six in 10 supported it. People unaffiliated with any religious organization were least likely to back it. Only four in 10 of them did.

The analysis is based on a Pew Research Center survey of 742 American adults conducted April 14-21. It did not include analysis of groups other than white evangelicals, white non-Hispanic Catholics, white mainline Protestants and the religiously unaffiliated, because the sample size was too small. See results of the survey »

The president of the National Association of Evangelicals, Leith Anderson, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The survey asked: “Do you think the use of torture against suspected terrorists in order to gain important information can often be justified, sometimes be justified, rarely be justified, or never be justified?”

Roughly half of all respondents — 49 percent — said it is often or sometimes justified. A quarter said it never is.

The religious group most likely to say torture is never justified was Protestant denominations — such as Episcopalians, Lutherans and Presbyterians — categorized as “mainline” Protestants, in contrast to evangelicals. Just over three in 10 of them said torture is never justified. A quarter of the religiously unaffiliated said the same, compared with two in 10 white non-Hispanic Catholics and one in eight evangelicals

So several religious people, especially the more fanatical ones like Evangelicals, contend that atheists essentially are without a value system because they do not believe in God. Atheists are hedonistic beings that have no soul.  Apparently without a big scary father figure threatening bad things to happen to you if you don’t fall in line (insert snide remark about Obama and his ever expanding footprint of government in people’s lives), people would be raping, covetous, thieving murders.

Well apparently those that have no religious affiliation are more likely to not want to simulate drowning on a prisoner. The results of this survey were not surprising to me at all. Rational individuals in general evaluate the probable efficacy of torture and a good many realize that there are better and more effective ways of finding out information. Religious individuals are spoon fed their thoughts and values and are quick to make a likely irrational decision based on emotion and not fact… which is how we ended up on this whole war on terror overseas contingency conflict anyway.

For those that actually have a sense of humor,  you can find the full gallery at Encyclopedia Dramatica but I will share some of my favorites with you here.

First, I love how the media is blowing this thing way out of proportion. I think its all in the name. Swine flu just sounds cool. In fact, I was extremely disappointed when I found it was transmitted like a normal flu. I thought you got it from eating or having contact with pork. I was looking forward to getting some ribs, chops or pork loin on sale from the grocery store.

Since everyone is royally freaked out by this relatively innocuous disease, let’s see what our non-hyperbolic non-sensationalist scientist friends told the LA Times:

The swine virus does appear able to spread easily among humans, which persuaded the WHO to boost its influenza pandemic alert level to phase 5, indicating that a worldwide outbreak of infection is very likely. And the CDC reported on its website that “a pattern of more severe illness associated with the virus may be emerging in the United States.” [...]

But certainly nothing that would dwarf a typical flu season. In the U.S., between 5% and 20% of the population becomes ill and 36,000 people die — a mortality rate of between 0.24% and 0.96%.

Dirk Brockmann, a professor of engineering and applied mathematics at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., used a computer model of human travel patterns to predict how this swine flu virus would spread in the worst-case scenario, in which nothing is done to contain the disease.

After four weeks, almost 1,700 people in the U.S. would have symptoms, including 198 in Los Angeles, according to his model. That’s just a fraction of the county’s thousands of yearly flu victims.

So now that we have that in perspective, imagine if whole school systems were shut down due to a common cold or every business suspends travel to a country because there is a “bad case of the runs” going around. Its absolutely insane the power of media in causing a hysteria. Perhaps its just a vast left wing conspiracy to take away from analysis of Obama’s first 100 days and how “change” looks an awful lot like the past 8 years.

Anyway, I thought I would share 5 pandemics (courtesy of Neatorama) that were probably deserving of 24 hour coverage on CNN and MSNBC but fortunately they weren’t around. I can imagine something like any of these 5 happening today – people would be slathering their bodies in Purell under the guise that they are protecting yourself (the rant about sanitizing and killing all germs and bacteria all the time is another diatribe).

1. The Peloponnesian War Pestilence

The very first pandemic in recorded history was described by Thucydides. In 430 BC, during the Peloponnesian war between Athens and Sparta, the Greek historian told of a great pestilence that wiped out over 30,000 of the citizens of Athens (roughly one to two thirds of all Athenians died).

Thucydides described the disease as such “People in good health were all of a sudden attacked by violent heats in the head, and redness and inflammation in the eyes, the inward parts, such as the throat or tongue, becoming bloody and emitting an unnatural and fetid breath.” Next came coughing, diarrhea, spasms, and skin ulcers. A handful survived, but often without their fingers, sights, and even genitals (Source)

Until today, the disease that decimated ancient Athens has yet to be identified.

2. The Antonine Plague

In 165 AD, Greek physician Galen described an ancient pandemic, now thought to be smallpox, that was brought to Rome by soldiers returning from Mesopotamia. The disease was named after Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, one of two Roman emperors who died from it.

At its height, the disease killed some 5,000 people a day in Rome. By the time the disease ran its course some 15 years later, a total of 5 million people were dead.

3. The Plague of Justinian

In 541-542 AD, there was an outbreak of a deadly disease in the Byzantine Empire. At the height of the infection, the disease, named the Plague of Justinian after the reigning emperor Justinian I, killed 10,000 people in Constantinople every day. With no room nor time to bury them, bodies were left stacked in the open.

By the end of the outbreak, nearly half of the inhabitants of the city were dead. Historians believe that this outbreak decimated up to a quarter of human population in the eastern Mediterranean. (source)

What was the culprit? It was the bubonic plague, caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis. This outbreak, the first known bubonic plague pandemic in recorded human history, marked the first of many outbreaks of plague – a disease that claimed as many as 200 million lives throughout history.

4. The Black Death

After the Plague of Justinian, there were many sporadic oubreaks of the plague, but none as severe as the Black Death of the 14th century.

While no one knows for certain where the disease came from (it was thought that merchants and soldiers carried it over caravan trading routes), the Black Death took a heavy toll on Europe. The fatality was recorded at over 25 million people or one-fourth of the entire population. (source)

It’s interesting to note that the Black Death actually came in three forms: the bubonic, pneumonic, and septicemic plague. The first, the bubonic plague, was the most common: people with this disease have buboes or enlarged lymphatic glands that turn black (caused by decaying of the skin while the person is still alive). Without treatment, bubonic plague kills about half of those infected within 3 to 7 days.

In pneumonic plague, droplets of aerosolized Y. pestis bacteria are transmitted from human to human by coughing. Unless treated with antibiotics in the first 24 hours, almost 100% of people with this form of infection die in 2 to 4 days.

The last form, septicemic plague, happens when the bacteria enter the blood from the lymphatic or respiratory system. Patients with septicemic plague develop gangrenes in their fingers and toes, which turn the skin black (which gives the disease its moniker) Though rare, this form of the disease is almost always fatal – often killing its victims the same day the symptoms appear. (Photo and Source: Insecta-Inspecta)

We haven’t heard the last of the bubonic plague. In 1855, another bubonic plague epidemic (named the Third Epidemic) hit the world – this time, the initial outbreak was in Yunnan Province, China. Human migration, trade and wars helped the disease spread from China to India, Africa, and the Americas.

All in all, this pandemic lasted about 100 years (it officially ended in 1959) and claimed over 12 million people in India and China alone.

5. The Spanish Flu

Emergency military hospital at Camp Funston, Kansas (Image: National Museum of Health and Medicine, Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, Washington D.C.) via PLoS Biology

In March 1918, in the last months of World War I, an unusually virulent and deadly flu virus was identified in a US military camp in Kansas. Just 6 months later, the flu had become a worldwide pandemic in all continents.

When the Spanish Flu pandemic was over, about 1 billion people or half the world’s population had contracted it. It is perhaps the most lethal pandemic in the history of humankind: between 20 and 100 million people were killed, more the number killed in the war itself (Source)

The Spanish Flu actually didn’t originate in Spain – it got its name because at the time, Spain wasn’t involved in the war and had not imposed wartime censorship, thus it received great press attention there.

Recently, scientists were able to “resurrect” the virus from a well-preserved corpse buried in the permafrost of Alaska. (Ed. note: Hooray!)

ha, ha

We finally found him!

And lastly a series of moving pictures!

Now if I only knew anyone that was even close to 18 to share this with…

50 Things Every 18-Year-Old Should Know

1) “If you are buying something that you will use often and for a long time, never go cheap. You’ll end up replacing it sooner or paying more in maintenance costs than if you had spent more on good quality in the beginning. Plus, you’ll enjoy the nicer product throughout its lifetime, rather than cringing every time you use something that is falling apart.” — bretts

2) Don’t spend money on a credit card that you can’t afford to pay back. The interest and late payments can put you in a hole that can take you years to pay back.

3) Compound interest is your friend. Saving even a relatively small percentage of your income each year, starting at 18, can leave you in much better shape by the time you’re ready to retire.

4) If you’re working with someone who can be bargained down on a price, it seldom hurts to try. The exceptions may be someone of exceptional talent, someone you’re going to have to work with on a regular basis, or someone whose help you’re going to need in a timely manner.

5) Try to keep enough cash to pay your bills for at least six months in reserve. It will make your life immeasurably easier if your car breaks down, you have a surprise medical expense, or you get an opportunity to get a fantastic bargain.

6) Dogs are fantastic animals. They deserve to be called man’s best friend. But, if you are under the impression that you just need to buy a collar and a bag of dry dog food every month and you’re set, you’re in for a rude awakening. Dogs tend to be much more expensive and time consuming than you’d think.

7) “Don’t have any children or get married until you can support and love yourself first.” — D-Vega

“Don’t trade your vehicle in on a new one just a couple of years after buying it. Pay it off and ride it until (the wheels fall off), all while putting that car payment in the bank.” — The_Muck_Man

9) College is a lot more work than high school and your job will be a lot more work than college was.

10) Start looking for a new job BEFORE you quit your old job.

11) Don’t take any job that only pays commission unless you’re either an expert salesman or ready to spend months working without pay to gain the skills you need to become an expert salesman.

12) Ideally, you should choose something you love to do so much that you’d do it for free and find a way to make it into a career.

13) When asking for a salary, always have a figure you want in mind — and then ask for significantly more than that number. That way, you may get more than what you want and even if you don’t, you have a better chance of getting the amount you had in mind than if you had blurted it out right off the bat.

14) There’s no shame in taking any honest job.

15) Getting fired or laid off isn’t the end of the world. To the contrary, a lot of people, myself included, have moved on to bigger and better things after being laid off or fired.

16) If you’re not happy with the job market, the government, or the schools in your area, remember that you can always move to another city or another state. Lots of Americans do just that every year.

17) “I wish that I had known to check the oil in my vehicles and to have changed it regularly. It would have saved a lot of money that I spent on repairs — directly due to my lack of changing the oil per the mechanic.” — Ann H.

18) Lefty loosey, righty tighty. Turn it to the left to loosen it and to the right to tighten it.

19) Don’t ever open a hot radiator cap or you can get seriously burned.

20) Here are 3 keys to keeping a reasonably clean house: don’t leave any dishes in the sink overnight; every time you have a full load of clothes, wash ‘em, and take out the trash every time the can is full. You do those things, wipe up your messes, and vacuum when the floor gets filthy, and you’ll keep things reasonably neat.

21) If you use a computer even semi-regularly, it’s worth your time to take a typing class.

22) It’s not enough to buy a gun and stick it in a drawer like a lucky talisman. You need to learn to use the gun.

23) When you move, sell, throw away, and give away as much as possible or you’ll just end up moving boxes from one closet, where they have been sitting for five years, to another closet, where they’ll be sitting for the next five years.

24) Don’t ever loan your friends money if you want to keep them as friends. After all, if they were good with money and were likely to pay you back in a timely manner, they probably wouldn’t need the loan in the first place. If they really need the money, you want to help them, and you can afford it — just give it to them.

25) Women should never allow a boyfriend to take naked pictures. If it’s on film, you shouldn’t be surprised if it goes public in one form or fashion after a break-up.

26) When men have a problem and they tell you about it, they want to know how to fix it. When women have a problem and they tell you about it, they just want you to listen.

27) If you ever get arrested, don’t say anything until you talk to a lawyer.

28) If you don’t know the agenda of the people you’re getting your news from, then you don’t have the information you need to know if what they’re telling you is true.

29) Government is a necessary evil. It’s best to keep its tentacles out of your life and out of our society as much as possible.

30) “When you’re 18, you worry about what everybody is thinking of you; when you’re 40, you don’t give a darn what anybody thinks of you; when you’re 60, you realize nobody’s been thinking about you at all.” — Daniel Amen

31) Trust your instincts. They’re usually right.

32) If you think a doctor’s wrong, don’t hesitate to ask for a second opinion. Your health is vitally important and doctors make mistakes just as often as anyone else.

33) Don’t ever say anything that may offend someone who is going to be serving you food. You never know what they may stick in it when you’re not looking.

34) If you get into a business deal with someone who goes to unusual lengths to convince you of how honest or Christian they are, watch your wallet and make sure you have an iron clad contract. They “doth protest too much.”

35) “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” – Jim Rohn

36) If you want to do something exceptional, don’t expect anyone to believe you can do it until you’ve done it. Unless you’re already perceived as exceptional, most people won’t believe in you. That’s doubly true for the people who know you best and have therefore seen you at your most mediocre, like your parents, family, and friends.

37) If you don’t feel like you’re being treated fairly by a company, don’t hesitate to ask for a manager. Oftentimes, a manager has gotten to where he is in a company because he is good at pleasing customers like you in the first place.

38) “You are not invulnerable and you are not going to live forever. You can (make) mistakes at 18 that you will have to live with for the rest of your life.” — Don_cos

39) Nobody owes you a living.

40) You are not a victim.

41) If you just assume that every conspiracy theory is wrong without even examining it, you will be right 99.99% of the time.

42) “It’s likely that whatever challenges you have faced in your life currently could have been avoided but some better decisions upstream.” — Tony Robbins

43) At a minimum, keep a basic “to do” list, a schedule, and a budget.

44) “Excellence is the gradual result of always striving to do better.” — Pat Riley

45) “If you want your life to have impact, focus it! Stop dabbling. Stop trying to do it all. Do less. Prune away even good activities and do only that which matters most. Never confuse activity with productivity. You can be busy without a purpose, but what’s the point?” — Rick Warren

46) Ironically, successful people tend to fail a lot more than unsuccessful people. They also tend to ask a lot more questions.

47) When you consider Christianity, keep in mind this classic quotation from C.S. Lewis, “If I, being what I am, can consider that I am in some sense a Christian, why should the different vices of those people in the next pew prove that their religion is mere hypocrisy and convention?”

48) You beat 50% of the people by just showing up. You beat another 40% by working hard. The last 10% is a dogfight in the free enterprise system.

49) There are at least six key areas of your life: health, career, romantic, social, money, and religion. If you neglect any one of those areas, it will harm you in the other areas and keep you from being as happy as you can be otherwise.

50) When trying to decide between two closely matched alternatives, always have a bias towards action. In the long run, it’ll lead to your having a lot more experience, great stories, and a richer, fuller life.

Credit: http://rightwingnews.com/mt331/2009/04/50_things_every_18yearold_shou.php

If you live in the Baltimore area and spend any time in any establishment that accept credit cards in the area, you probably have seen this pen. It never ceases to amaze me how I can be in bistro in Arundel Mills, a liquor store in Westminster or even a restaurant in Ocean City, the pen is there when I have to sign my receipt.

Now I likely will never need bail bonding services – unless someone gets me punched in the face – but Big Boyz Bail Bonds is forever ingrained in my mental Yellow Pages of businesses. All because of the ubiquitiousnous of the yellow and pink pen.

It is a very intriquing marketing strategy. As far as I am aware, Big Boyz does not do traditional media advertising. No TV, radio or print. Only pens as far as I know. Apparently they order over 400,000 year.

By spreading these pens all around the state, they are likely getting their brand name out to far more people than if they did use traditional methods. Not understandably traditional methods can be more targeted but the pen strategy is certainly more subversive. I may not ever need bail bonding but if anyone asks me, the only bail bondsman I would likely think of is Big Boyz.

Nowadays, no one believes or listens to traditional media advertising. Consumers increasingly Tivo and skip commercials, use the Internet and ignore ads and are using Mp3 players to avoid radio entirely. Viral advertising and word of mouth is what works…at least today. By subliminal repeated exposure via a relatively inane product, the company becomes more visible.

I am not even touching the argument of the ethics of this type of subversive marketing but I am acknowledging the notion of how a simple item that is used daily by almost all of us can be turned into a marketing strategy by a local business is impressive whether you agree with it or not.

My dear readers, it has been a long time since I have posted on this blog. I suppose I have been distracted by the shiny new toy that has been Facebook. The ease of posting random crap there has been too convenient but lacks a certain romanticism that blogging has. So my next few posts will be a hodge podge of random thoughts I have had over my absence of the past few months.

I will start off this menagerie right by sharing a meme that has lightened up my life and brought many hours of joy and laughter to me…9 seconds at a time. I present to you the funniest 9 seconds on the web courtesy of our 420 inspired friend Arthur!

And if that wasn’t enough, the extended remix

If you don’t find at least the remix funny, stop reading my blog…on principle and based on the pure fact, we will not get along.

More to come!

In my neck of the woods, a local farm/nursery decided to stage a pig mud wrestling competition in order to stir up some business. Well as you could guess, all the damn PETA and animal cruelty people who vote for the death penalty and tell all the bums on the street to get a job pitched a fit. The owner was able to run one of the events (it was to be a tournament with several teams competing in multiple heats on different days) but was forced to cancel the remaining events due to pressure of fines and boycotts.

So what’s a guy to do to try to drum up business? The answer is at the end of this article from the Baltimore Sun. I have to give props to the owner for knowing how to stick it to his naysayers and show how asinine this whole thing is.

Farmer cancels pig-wrestling contests

Amid fears of fines, violence, he stops remaining schedule

By Joe Burris

October 7, 2008

Dabkowski still doesn’t know whether his pig mud-wrestling contest last month violated Baltimore County animal-control laws.

But after receiving complaints from animal-rights groups, word of a possible boycott of his business and a threat of violence, the Spring Meadow Farms owner has decided to cancel the remainder of the schedule.

“The week [before the event] we had about six to eight negative comments,” the farmer said yesterday. “Afterward we had about 30 to 40, and one guy threatened to do violence to me, my family and my business.”

The event in Upperco drew complaints from animal-rights groups People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and the Humane League of Baltimore, and raised questions about whether it violated a county code that prohibits instigating combat between animals and humans.

Dabkowski said he got the idea from a friend and fellow farmer in Pennsylvania who has generated local interest and revenue from pig mud-wrestling. Dabkowski invested $3,000 in 24 pigs and construction of a 30-foot-diameter ring.

About 200 people turned out for the Sept. 27 event, where several four-member teams took turns trying to catch pigs and place them in a round water trough in less than 90 seconds to compete for a $150 prize.

Dabkowski, who had planned to stage about three more contests, said he was concerned that the county might fine him up to $2,000 – $100 for each of the 20 pigs used in the first event. County officials attended and filmed the first event, and Dabkowski said they told him they would study the film to decide whether citations were warranted.

He canceled an event slated for last Saturday for fear of additional fines. County Health Department spokeswoman Monique Lyle said yesterday that officials had not yet determined whether the event violated code.

Another factor, Dabkowski says, was word that opponents were advocating a boycott of Spring Meadow Farms. Dabkowski’s operation includes a produce market, garden center, ice cream shop and a farm zoo.

In a news release, the Humane League took credit for “shutting down” the competition. Aaron Ross, a spokesman for the group, said he attended the September event and sent an e-mail to members urging a boycott of the farm’s products. Dabkowski said many members called or e-mailed to voice their objections, and that he was concerned about losing business.

And then there was a threat of violence that came in an e-mail.

“After the threats, my wife started having chest pains,” Dabkowksi added. “The [county] taped the event but they still haven’t told us whether we’ve done anything wrong. My wife and I prayed about it, and we’ve decided to lay it to rest. We’re not in position to do battle with the county and take on thousands of dollars worth of fines.”

Dabkowski said he had heard rumors of protests at future events. For him, the slew of inflammatory calls and e-mails was enough.

“It started getting ugly. One person said that I belonged in the same jail cell as Michael Vick,” he said, referring to the former NFL star imprisoned for sponsoring a dogfighting ring where animals were tortured and killed.

The pig-wrestling competition is history, but Dabkowski said he is planning a pig roast Oct. 18 that’s open to the public.

“That’s what pigs are for,” he said.

In a belated celebration of the Supreme Court ruling which allowed residents of the District of Columbia to own handguns, I thought I would post this heartwarming story of a granny that was packing and how she protected her neck and possibly stopped a burglary crime ring with her all powerful .22 revolver.

Actor dramatization of the event

SPRINGHILL TWP. – State police said an 85-year-old Lake Lynn woman is being credited with stopping a would-be thief after she caught the teen in her home Sunday afternoon.

Trooper Christian D. Lieberum said Leda Smith held the unidentified intruder at gunpoint until police arrived.

He said the incident began around 3 p.m. when a 17-year-old Point Marion boy broke into Smith’s home on Old Lake Lynn Road.

Smith said she had just come home from church when she noticed a door open at her home and an outer door broken.

Lieberum said Smith immediately realized someone was in her home and decided to retrieve her handgun and went looking for the intruder.

“I saw him move by my keyboard near the wall but I just walked right on past him to the bedroom and got my gun,” Smith said, noting that she started keeping the .22-caliber revolver by her bed after a burglary at a neighboring home several weeks ago.

Smith said she then found the boy hiding and confronted him.

“I said, ‘What are you doing in my house?’” Smith said during an interview Monday with WPXI-TV, Channel 11 in Pittsburgh, a news partner with the Herald-Standard. “He just kept saying he didn’t do it.”

Smith ordered the teen to turn around and not to run and then had him pick up the telephone and dial 911.

She then ordered the boy to give her the telephone after placing the call and she told dispatchers about the intruder.

Officials from 911 stayed on the telephone with Smith as she had the boy lay facedown and spread-eagled on the floor.

She said it didn’t take emergency crews long to respond.

Lieberum said Smith continued to hold the teen at gunpoint until state police arrived at the home.

“It was exciting,” Smith said of the incident. “I just hope I broke up the ring because they have been hitting a lot of places around here.”

Lieberum said the boy will be charged with attempted burglary and other offenses in Fayette County Juvenile Court.