I’ve blogged about D.B. Cooper before…he’s the fellow who hijacked an airliner, demanded and received $200,000 and a parachute, and then bailed out of the plane somewhere over the Washington/Oregon border. He disappeared without a trace, and his case remains one of the more tantalizing mysteries of recent memory.

And today, a piece of the puzzle may have just been dug out of the ground. A group of children playing in the woods found a parachute sticking out of the ground, where it had apparently been buried many years before. The parachute is at least the same colour as Cooper’s (white), and was found in the area that many believe the hijacker landed. The FBI is now analyzing the chute to see if it can be conclusively linked to the Cooper case.

Of course, there are a few problems. In 1980, about $5,800 of Cooper’s cash ransom was found on a beach near Vancouver. At the time, folks thought the money had been washed there by a river. But if Cooper really did land at the Parachute site, then there’s no way the money could have made it to the beach naturally. Like any good mystery, a new clue ends up posing more questions than it answers.

I’ll post some more updates as soon as I hear more.

UPDATE: The FBI says no dice. It’s a parachute, but it ain’t DB’s.

Get your chequebooks ready, gentlemen (and ladies, too. I don’t want to leave anyone out). If the price is right, you can own a piece of French politics. Sexy, sexy French politics.

Yesterday, Christie’s announced it would be auctioning a photo of France’s first lady and former model, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy. You may ask: so what? Well, my truculent friend, this photo features Bruni-Sarkozy in the all-together. And not to lower the level of discourse around here, but…HAWT!

This, to me, says a lot about the, er, je ne sais quoi of the French people. Can you think of any other nation on Earth with first lady nudie pics? And more to the point, first lady nudie pics you’d actually want to see? I mean, Laura Bush seems like a nice lady, but, well…c’mon. The French can be fantastically irritating at times, but it’s hard to stay mad at them for long. Great food, hot first ladies…they must be doing something right.

Click here for the NSFW pic, courtesy of the smutty British tabloids.

All right, all you crazy BSG fans. Finally, a contest we can all get behind: DESIGN YOUR OWN CYCLON!

The SCIFI.COM, DVICE and MAKE magazine are co-sponsoring the competition. In their words:

You know the Cylons — that fanatical race of genocidal robots? There are a bunch of different kinds, from toaster-like automatons to human-looking androids to fighter planes, and the idea is for contestants to mod something (or create something from scratch) to make it look like a Cylon. You can put photos of your entry on Flickr or video on YouTube with a special tag or just send them in to a specific e-mail address we’ve set up (details after the Continue link below). Judging the entries will be none other than BSG cast members Tricia Helfer and Grace Park. The best ones will be featured on the SCI FI Channel!

Coooool. I think I’ll convert my car- a totally cherry 98 Ford Contour with 340,000KM on it- into the much feared Cylon Compact Sedan. All it really needs is a scanning red eye light thingy and an inexorable desire to screw with the human race. 

To be fair, it kinda has the last bit already. If by ‘screw’ you mean ‘frequently break down’ and by ‘human race’ you mean ‘me’. 

For some reason unknown even to myself, I subscribe to the Statistics Canada RSS feed. This is syndication at its most mind-numbingly boring: recent gems include “Cereals and Oilseeds Review, January 2008″ and “Stocks of Frozen Poultry, March 2008″. But here’s a classic from today:

Crushing Statistics, February 2008.

Crushing statistics? What, is it data about how many people in Canada are morbidly depressed, or some linear regression detailing the ultimate futility of all human endeavour? Well, no. Actually, it’s about how many tonnes of oilseed and grains were ground up in February. But you’ve got to admit, the headline leads you to expect a bit more drama than the processing of meal. Crushing, indeed.

Interesting piece in the Guardian today by Steve Feltham, a self-described, full-time ‘Nessie Hunter’. He gave up a job, a girlfriend and his house to look for the mythical lake creature. And it’s not a glamorous life, either- he lives in a van with no electricity or running water, and sells little clay models of Nessie to get by.

Most people probably think Feltham is a little crazy. And they may be right. Still, there’s something about him that resonates:

Film crews and journalists from all over the world turn up on a regular basis, and I answer all their questions, but they are invariably focused on one subject: is there a monster, or isn’t there? Which is perfectly understandable, but it frustrates me that I never have the chance to get an equally important point across: that if you have a dream, no matter how harebrained others think it is, then it is worth trying to make it come true. I’m living proof that it might just work.

Or more simply:

Grown men looking for monsters? Fantastic.

There’s very little wonder left in the modern world. So here’s to grown men, everywhere, who spend their lives looking for something that, in the end, is kinda nuts. I’m glad they do…it makes me feel like the world is a little less compartmentalized.

I remember discussing the Iraq war, way back in 2004, in a Swiss Chalet (for some reason, a quarter-chicken dinner is a fabulous political lubricant). This was back in the early days of the insurgency, when everyone seemed a bit confused as to why so many Americans were getting blown up. I said something like, “It’s going to be very interesting when the death toll exceeds the number of people killed on September 11th.” Both my companions were unequivocal in their replies:

“Not going to happen.”

“There’s no way that many soldiers will die.”

What a difference four years makes. Today, after four more soldiers died in Baghdad, the AP put the American death toll at 4,000 KIA. That’s a lot of people. Add that to the potentially hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have died in the conflict, and you’ve got a tragedy of biblical proportions.

So, out of all the stated and unstated justifications for the Iraq war – WMDs, Crazy Saddam, Vengeance, Oil – what are we left with? The WMDs were a lie, Crazy Saddam is dead, and any claims to vengeance are obliterated when the death toll of the revenge exercise vastly exceeds the event you were ostensibly trying to avenge (which of course is also completely false, given that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11). And I’m skeptical of the oil thing, because I’m still paying a lot of money at the pumps.

I’m forced to conclude that the American presence in Iraq is like a grotesque version of the Keystone Cops, a kind of rough analogue to getting so involved in an argument, you forget what it was you were arguing about in the first place. The Iraq war was (and is) a criminal exercise in stupidity, one with no end in sight. It is a shame the 4,000 + 100,000++ dead will get no justice. The perpetrators of this crime will waltz into a comfortable retirement, free to write their memoirs and clear brush from their ranches unwounded, un-blown up, and still very much alive. 

Bastards. 

Frequent readers of this site will recall I was pretty excited about the USA shooting down a crippled satellite. But who knew I would only have to wait four weeks for the movie?

Coolness. I like the soundtrack especially. Of course, I probably would have cast Val Kilmer as the crippled satellite, but I suppose that’s why I’m not a filmmaker.