Cat gives owners the thumbs up

The video, posted on YouTube on Wednesday, called 'amazing cat gives thumbs-up', has been watched over 160,000 times.

In the clip the cat, called Jimmy, can be heard being coached by his female owner to perform his party trick of raising a toe on his front paw.

Well Deserved Fail

The title says it all......

Book bound in human skin goes on display in Devon

When Devon murderer George Cudmore was sentenced to hang at the Lent Assizes in 1830, he knew that part of his sentence was that his dead body would be taken to an Exeter hospital to be dissected.

What he probably was not aware of was that a chunk of his skin would eventually be flayed, tanned and used to cover an 1852 copy of The Poetical Works of John Milton.

The book is now housed at the Westcountry Studies Library in Exeter.

It will go on show to the public for the first time on 26 February as part of Devon's annual Local History Day.

An inscription in the front of the book states whose skin it is and his crime.

Cudmore, a ratcatcher from Roborough, was convicted of killing his wife Grace by poisoning.

He was hanged at the Devon County Gaol - on the site of the current Exeter Prison - on 25 March 1830.

"We don't really know why the skin was retained or, indeed, where," said Tony Rouse, senior assistant librarian.

"It must have been kept somewhere until 1853 when it was used to cover the book."
The book is inscribed with information on whose skin it is made from

While binding books in human skin is not common, it is not unusual, says Mr Rouse.

The practice is known as anthropodermic bibliopegy and seems to have been most popular during the 18th and 19th centuries.

Many of the first books covered in human skin were medical books - the skins were primarily from amputated body parts and unclaimed corpses.

Paul Hellyer claims UFO cover-up

He is on an advisory body to the Queen, works as an environmental campaigner and is credited with integrating Canada's armed forces.

But aside from all this, the ex-Canadian defence minister says UFOs are real, aliens have visited Earth and the U.S. government is covering up information about them.

Paul Hellyer says he would probably get fired for his views if he was still Canada's Minister of National Defense today, but is adamant he has seen UFOs himself.

The 87-year-old, who is the longest-serving member of the Queen's Privy Council for Canada, said he never discussed his views with top officials when he was in office.

‘This is the kind of thing that sometimes they don't tell politicians about,’ he said.

‘I have no doubt that there were probably people in my employ who would have been more knowledgeable than I was at the time.’

‘I got periodic reports on sightings and I looked at them very casually. It was decided that about 80 per cent of them were natural phenomena of one sort or another and the other 20 per cent roughly were unexplained and therefore unidentified.’

Mr Hellyer is presenting his views on UFOs this week at the International UFO Congress in Scottsdale, Arizona, and says he is ‘convinced’ of their existence.

‘We lived too long in a sense of isolation, thinking that Earth was the centre of the cosmos, that we were the only species and, therefore, probably the most advanced.'

‘And when we come to the realisation that we're not any of those things, then I think we should be aware of it (and) learn to live with it,' he told AOL News.Mr Hellyer claims to have seen a UFO with his wife when spending last Thanksgiving near Toronto, and they stared at the sky for 20 minutes watching it moving.

He told AOL: ‘By process of elimination, we determined it wasn't a star or satellite and it wasn't the space station, so there was really no explanation for it other than it was, in fact, a UFO. It looked like a star, but it manoeuvred in a way that stars don't.’

He believes the U.S. has developed new forms of energy at secret ‘black operation’ units using alien technology and that a ‘shadow government’ is behind this activity.

Oxygen 2.0 Finally Release

I have to say I'm a huge fan of Adam G over at XDA and the work he puts into his desire rom Oxygen.

I also respect him slightly more as he is a fellow Brit, and there aren't many decent British devs (most seem to be the other side of the pond)! Anyway I digress....

I've slapped this onto my HTC Desire and I have to say I love it.

Rocking out Android 2.3.3 and being a fully working non hacky rom it is nothing short of amazing.

With all the usual Oxygen goodness this is the most stable Gingerbread to date!

You can find the rom on XDA.

Or here is a direct download.

Enjoy and thanks for all the hard work Adam.