Category: You Decide

Editor’s Note: Although this may be a real business, it brings to mind the Cathouse for Dogs hoax perpetrated by Joey Skaggs in 1976, where for $50.00 you could get Fido sexually gratified.

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Company Sinks Teeth Into Dog Time Shares
by Lisa Leff
Philly.com
July 29, 2007

San Francisco (AP) — From the state that popularized purse puppies, drive-thru dog washes and gourmet dog food delivery comes the latest in canine convenience – a company that contracts out dogs by the day to urbanites without the time or space to care for a pet full-time.

Marlena Cervantes, founder of FlexPetz, bristles when people refer to her five-month-old business as a rent-a-pet service. She prefers the term “shared pet ownership,” explaining the concept is more akin to a vacation time share or a gym membership than a trip to the video store.

“Our members are responsible in that they realize full-time ownership is not an option for them and would be unfair to the dog,” said Cervantes, 32, a behavioral therapist who got the idea while working with pets and autistic children. “It prevents dogs from being adopted and then returned to the shelter by people who realize it wasn’t a good fit.”

FlexPetz is currently available in Los Angeles and San Diego, where Cervantes lives. She plans to open new locations in San Francisco next month, New York in September and London by the end of the year. Continue reading “Rent-a-Pooch”

A US cat that is reportedly able to sense when a nursing home’s residents are about to die is baffling doctors.

US cat ‘predicts patient deaths’
BBC
July 26, 2007

Oscar has a habit of curling up next to patients at the home in Providence, Rhode Island, in their final hours.

According to the author of a study in the New England Journal of Medicine, the two-year-old cat has been observed to be correct in 25 cases so far.

Staff now alert the families of residents when he sits down next to their ailing loved one.

“He doesn’t make many mistakes. He seems to understand when patients are about to die,” David Dosa, a professor at Brown University who carried out the research, told the Associated Press news agency. Read the rest of the story here.

UFO sightings bring town to a standstill
Daily Mail
July 25, 2007

A crowd of 100 stunned stargazers brought a town centre to a standstill when five mysterious UFOs were spotted hovering in the sky.

Drinkers spilled out of pubs, motorists stopped to gawp and camera phones were aimed upwards as the five orbs, in a seeming formation, hovered above Stratford-Upon-Avon for half an hour.

The unidentified flying objects lit up the otherwise clear night sky above Shakespeare’s birthplace in Warwickshire on Saturday.

Although Air Traffic Control reported no unusual activity, some witnesses were convinced they were witnessing an extra-terrestrial spectacle. Continue reading “Extra-terrestrial Spectacle”

From Charlie Sorrel, Wired Blogs Gadget Lab, July 06, 2007:

Surprise! Perpetual Machine Demo Cancelled

The world changing technology/art project/prank known as Orbo has taken a rain check. The demonstration of the magnetic free energy machine was due to start a couple days ago, but various delays caused by “hot lights” meant that nobody has seen either the exhibit or the live, streaming video feeds. Steorn, the people behind Orbo, have packed up and gone back home to Ireland.

From the Steorn press release:

Attempts to replace those parts affected by the heat led to further failures and as a result we have to postpone the public demonstration until a future date. We apologise for the inconvenience caused to all the people who had made arrangements to visit the demonstration or were planning on viewing the demonstration online.

Some of our fine readers took me to task for being too cynical in our previous coverage. Not cynical, just skeptical. And this latest incident doesn’t add to my confidence.