Mr. 3000

Make that 3,002. Biggio goes 5-for-6.
Everyone on the team, including those in the bullpen, stormed the field to congratulate Biggio. His wife Patty, sons Conor and Cavan, and daughter Quinn also joined in the celebration. His sons were in the dugout acting as bat boys. He kissed his wife and held his 7-year-old daughter in the air. He went to the dugout and hugged everyone while the crowd continued to go wild. And then the time came – Craig Biggio had one person he absolutely positively had to share this moment with.

JEFF BAGWELL

Biggio pulled Jeff Bagwell out of the dugout and dragged him onto the infield where they stood arm and arm. Biggio and Bagwell played together for 15 seasons before Bagwell retired in December.

They stood there, hugging and smiling, waving, soaking in the moment together, just as they’d done so many times before. One final time, there they were – the greatest players this franchise has ever known. The Killer B’s! Biggio and Bagwell. Between the lines, on the field, adored by fans…

One last time.

Biggio got three singles in three at-bats, the last one a line drive to right-center in the bottom of the seventh inning. The 3,000-hit club got its 27th member Thursday night at 9:12 p.m. He would get five hits in all, the second-five hit game of his career. Biggio attempted to hustle it into a double and was thrown out for the third of the inning. Never mind that. The celebration began. His family joined him. His wife wept. Twenty seasons-2,781 games-10,648 at-bats. All of it will be defined by the next one. Flash bulbs popping with every pitch.

Fans stand through every turn at bat. Craig Biggio has earned all the adulation he gets.
He got standing ovations when he came to bat in the first, third and fifth innings. With one out in the third, he lined a single to left-center for No. 2,998. He got No. 2,999 in the fifth when Garrett Atkins threw wildly to first. Correct call by the official scorer.

His 3,000th hit arrived one day before the 19th anniversary of Biggio’s first big-league hit — June 29, 1988, a single off Orel Hershiser that began a sure Hall of Fame career during which he’s played in seven All-Star Games, six postseasons and one World Series. He is the only player in major league history to have at least 600 doubles (658), 250 home runs (286), 3,000 hits and 400 stolen bases (413).

 

“I couldn’t have scripted it any better,” Biggio said. “There are a lot of things that have happened over the past 20 years but tonight is the best.”

Biggio Photo Gallery through the years!
Biggio Stats Gallery through his career!!

Almost 3 years now…

My friend Sarah is a wonderful poet. She writes beautiful lyrics – just gorgeous. I was thinking of Rox and decided maybe I could write her something. I decided to give it a go. Lil’ Rox…the devastation never truly leaves. (Click pic – Roxy’s video)

‘Thunder away, my Love’
by Mike McMannes (With Epilogue)

She gazes into the who knows where, searching.
Pleased with life’s allowances – content with her place at the table.
Her voice howls delivering unintended softness.
Slowly, both drift away… the thunder submits.
She has won the day yet again.

So she lay.

She stares through the illusion of…
She smiles at the once was …
She clings to the might be, dreams of the yet still…

The dealer’s stare has begun. Play the cards, RO.
Odds sink as hope gets cast aside.

She knows. She knows.

Wide, uncertain eyes find their purpose – her love, her boy, her man, her soul.
Bravely…. She gazes again into the who knows where, searching.
Surveying without concern…

She knows.
She loves him.

Somewhere, a clock twists backwards. A bark, a resounding salute to youth.
The past and future fade.
She settles and finds his gaze for the last time.
A love just as the day they began.

He knows.
He so loves her.
And she, content with still being at the table…touching.
As minutes flee, seconds approach.
“Don’t….please….”

The dealer stares. Play the cards, RO.
Stand firm-stand pat; played all along was the hand she’d been dealt.
But it was his hand that was always for her.

“It’s ok, my boy – it’s ok.”
His desperate NO screams at the fading.
The pulse of their heart, a paw’s grip embedded.
The dealer breaks.
The Thunder saddens and bows his head.

She was.

Everything.
—

Somewhere, she was laughing and jumping.
But in the somewhere, there was that certain some -one- she needed.
That someone was there – so something started.
She went chasing!
Somehow, she found him.

Hey. You’re his brother?
Yeah – - yeah, I am…
The smile. The eyes. The waggle.
…Well, hello Roxy!

 

imissu

‘The Road’ was taken!

I don’t write book reviews. I mean, unless you’re a book reviewer, who would actually spend time writing reviews of other people’s work, especially if you’ve begun the process of creating your own? However, I wasn’t going to let this opportunity pass me by because when you’re moved – you’re moved; I’m going to stop writing and start writing (Get it? Ok then…). Today, I write a review of a book. Not just any book, mind you but one that has invoked inspiration, not only as a reader but as a writer.
The title of this book is THE ROAD, by Cormac McCarthy. In an earlier posting on DRAMABLOG, I discussed his interview with Oprah Winfrey. It was immediate and it was quick – I liked him. I liked his style and was taken with his ‘old charm.’ I must say that Mr. McCarthy most definitely caught me off guard.

I knew very little of him as a novelist, and even less about him as a person. The fact that he’s only done two print interviews in his lifetime is quite the oddity in itself. Couple that with the fact that he has never, ever appeared on television, well, that’s mind numbing. What about the fame? What about the attention? What about the me, me, me mentality of everyone, everywhere, with everything in every situation? Yeah, uh… not with this cat! I really and truly developed a healthy respect for Mr. McCarthy after seeing him interviewed. Of course, with Oprah, even though she has the interview of a lifetime, she makes it all about her, interrupting, the mic’d “Uh-Huh’ agreements that MUST be thrown in to affirm her knowledge of any and all subjects, even though was talking about Physics. Oprah is just…Oprah. She needs the attention. We all do but sometimes you just have to know when to let the other person have the floor.

He’s a very peculiar person-a very odd but intellectual man, I believe. He spends a great deal of his time at the Santa Fe Institute in Arizona. It’s here that many great minds get together to contemplate different thoughts, different philosophies, and different ways to approach things. McCarthy says that he likes coming to the Sante Fe Institute because there are a lot of bright people there who have a lot of bright things to say. My God if I could for just a week…anyway, I digress! It is here that Mr. McCarthy fits in perfectly. Further along in the interview, he talks about his main goal in life – not working. He simply doesn’t want to work and he has spent his whole life working toward that goal, working at not working. He mentions that he’s no afflicted artist who feels the anguish of his creations, his art. With that said, there’s no affectivity aroused from his art either. He’s just a writer who’s trying to understand his place in the world, as cliché as that sounds. Pulitzer Prize or not, he remains steadfast in who he is, but not so much as to be incapable of changing that mindset.

Last night, it was my mindset that was forced to change. I came to the end of THE ROAD. I must say, this book was truly, truly a great thing- for me, a wonderful experience. Never before have I had the written word bring me to such an emotional state quite like this book. To be honest, I’m not actually sure what it was that did it. The writing style, the structure with which this book was written is foreign to me. Strike that-his style WAS foreign to me but no longer. I’ve actually emulated him a great deal recently in my own writings and in my own different works. Trying to think like him, attempting to write like him, getting inside the head of someone like him has been fairly difficult… but I’m making progress!!

McCarthy goes on to say that he doesn’t think that interviews are good for your head. Also, when he was a kid he used to write, but when he was a teenager he did not do much of anything. He says that passion is a pretty fancy word. He likes what he does. He thinks that sometimes writing is difficult. You always have the vision of the perfect thing of which you can never achieve. But you never stop trying to achieve it. He thinks you have this interior image of something that is absolutely perfect. He thinks that this is your signpost, your guide. He thinks you will never get there; but without it..you will not get anywhere.

THE ROAD tells the story of a post-apocalyptic world, one without cause and one without solution. It is simply a story about a man and a boy and their journey together. I’ve heard it described as a love story between a man and his son… and I’m good with that. Actually, I’m really good with that. That explanation is very simple but is quite comprehensive in its description. It is a love story-it is about a man-it is about a boy. However, it is so much more than that!

This atmosphere he describes in this novel is putrid, dank, and saturated with rot. The way he describes this landscape is beautiful, descriptive, and poetic. How can that be? How does he do this? I’m not really sure, and if I were, or if one day I were to become sure, perhaps my name will accompany his as a Pulitzer Prize winner. For now, I’m just not sure. He’s just a master of his art and he takes a great deal of pride in the fact that he has no inhibitions, no concerns, and no real care as to whether or not anyone buys his book or even likes it, for that matter. He sat down in front of a typewriter and decided to write a masterpiece… and that’s what he did. Here’s another complement for Mr. McCarthy – I could read this book again. For no other reason than the wondrous way in which it was written, I could indeed read this book again.

Each page meticulously describes an unfamiliar, and truly dark world in a complex and detailed way, yet remains quite straightforward in delivery and unmistakable in the depiction of what the characters encounter throughout their journey. And that’s what this was, a journey, a trip through time, an exposé of another man’s mind delineated on paper revealing a great affection and patience, not only for the characters but for their miserable surroundings, as well.

THE ROAD, by Cormac McCarthy is one of those books that forces you to put it down with but a few chapters remaining. If you are a true lover of books and stories, you understand this frame of mind, what kind of book does this and why. If you are not someone who can allow themselves to become entranced by the thoughts and words of another person, then let me explain-

You do not want the story to end!!

Great book! This was one of those stories; this was one of those books. I still hate the fact that so many great stories force me to say goodbye – say farewell to the enchanting characters, to the mesmeric worlds in which they live, and to my own bewitched state, a mindset that produces great joy but one which starts the fading away process the moment the final page flips from right to left.
great joy but still one which begins to fade away as the final page flips from right to left.

 

 

 

 

 

All good things MUST…

JERUSALEM — Three-century-old manuscripts by Isaac Newton calculating the exact date of the apocalypse, detailing the precise dimensions of the ancient temple in Jerusalem and interpreting passages of the Bible — exhibited this week for the first time — lay bare the little-known religious intensity of a man many consider history’s greatest scientist.
Newton, who died 280 years ago, is known for laying much of the groundwork for modern physics, astronomy, math and optics. But in a new Jerusalem exhibit, he appears as a scholar of deep faith who also found time to write on Jewish law — even penning a few phrases in careful Hebrew letters — and combing the Old Testament’s Book of Daniel for clues about the world’s end.
The documents, purchased by a Jewish scholar at a Sotheby’s auction in London in 1936, have been kept in safes at Israel’s national library in Jerusalem since 1969. Available for decades only to a small number of scholars, they have never before been shown to the public.

In one manuscript from the early 1700s, Newton used the cryptic Book of Daniel to calculate the date for the apocalypse, reaching the conclusion that the world would end no earlier than 2060.
“It may end later, but I see no reason for its ending sooner,” Newton wrote. However, he added, “This I mention not to assert when the time of the end shall be, but to put a stop to the rash conjectures of fanciful men who are frequently predicting the time of the end, and by doing so bring the sacred prophesies into discredit as often as their predictions fail.”

In another document, Newton interpreted biblical prophecies to mean that the Jews would return to the Holy Land before the world ends. The end of days will see “the ruin of the wicked nations, the end of weeping and of all troubles, the return of the Jews captivity and their setting up a flourishing and everlasting Kingdom,” he posited.

The exhibit also includes treatises on daily practice in the Jewish temple in Jerusalem. In one document, Newton discussed the exact dimensions of the temple — its plans mirrored the arrangement of the cosmos, he believed — and sketched it. Another paper contains words in Hebrew, including a sentence taken from the Jewish prayerbook. Yemima Ben-Menahem, one of the exhibit’s curators, said the papers show Newton’s conviction that important knowledge was hiding in ancient texts.

“He believed there was wisdom in the world that got lost. He thought it was coded, and that by studying things like the dimensions of the temple, he could decode it,” she said. The Newton papers, Ben-Menahem said, also complicate the idea that science is diametrically opposed to religion. “These documents show a scientist guided by religious fervor, by a desire to see God’s actions in the world,” she said. The archives of Hebrew University in Jerusalem include a 1940 letter from Albert Einstein to Abraham Shalom Yahuda, the collector who purchased the papers a year earlier. Newton’s religious writings, Einstein wrote, provide “a variety of sketches and ongoing changes that give us a most interesting look into the mental laboratory of this unique thinker.”

Cormac McCarthy takes the long hard ‘ROAD!’

Reclusive novelist talks to Oprah

New York, June 06: Nothing is predictable about Oprah Winfrey’s book picks — except for their sales. Once associated with inspirational narratives such as Jacqueline Mitchard’s “The Deep End of the Ocean,” Winfrey has been increasingly willing to take on the most challenging books and the most challenging writers.Over the past few years, she has recommended novels by Faulkner, Tolstoy and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, even as she advocates diet and self-help books, such as Rhonda Byrne’s million-selling “The Secret,” when not choosing works for her club.On Tuesday, she announced her new club selection: Jeffrey Eugenides’ “Middlesex,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel narrated by a hermaphrodite — someone with both male and female sexual organs — and aired a talk with her previous pick, Cormac McCarthy, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author’s first ever television interview.

“I am proud to be in the same company as Tolstoy and Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy,” Eugenides said in an interview from his home in Chicago.“The image Oprah Winfrey has had just isn’t true,” said Jonathan Galassi, publisher of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, which released Eugenides’ novel in 2002. “It seems that the club has been going more up market. I think she must have found that readers responded well to those kinds of books.”

The 73-year-old McCarthy has spoken with the press just twice before — both times for print publications — in the past 40 years, but he opened up for Winfrey. The author said he has nothing against the media; he just doesn’t like talking about what he does — a trait Winfrey illustrated with a story about how McCarthy, when he had no money years ago, refused a speaking engagement that would have paid him $2,000.

“You work your side of the street, I’ll work mine,” he said in an interview that was taped at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico.Dressed in a blue work shirt open at the collar and tan slacks, the author looked trim and much younger than his age. He sat slouched in an arm chair and spoke calmly, carefully, in a low, rumbling voice. His answers were thoughtful, even when the questions seemed to make him a bit uncomfortable, as when Winfrey asked whether “The Road” was “a love story to your son.”"It was kind of refreshing how he didn’t seem to be aware of the camera, or play to the camera at all, as so-called professional authors do,” Eugenides said.

Known for his rural settings, biblical prose and affinity for bygone worlds, McCarthy said that while typically he doesn’t know where the ideas for his books originate, he can trace “The Road” to a trip he took with his young son to El Paso, Texas, about four years ago.There, standing at the window of a hotel in the middle of the night, his son asleep nearby, he started to imagine what El Paso might look like 50 or 100 years in the future.”I just had this image of these fires up on the hill … and I thought a lot about my little boy,” said McCarthy, whose previous books include “Blood Meridian” and “All the Pretty Horses.”He said he wrote some of his thoughts down and didn’t really think about it again until he was in Ireland a few years later and the novel came to him.”There was a book, and it was about that man and that little boy,” he said.”The Road,” this year’s winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, is about a father and his son as they wander through a barren post-nuclear landscape. It is dedicated to McCarthy’s son, John Francis, and the author acknowledged that he wouldn’t have written it had he not had a son.Having a child as an older man also had its effect on McCarthy.

“It wrenches you up out of your nap and makes you look at things fresh,” he said. “It forces the world on you, and I think it’s a good thing.”Winfrey was clearly fascinated with McCarthy’s life, particularly the time when he was so poor that he once was tossed out of a $40-a-month hotel because he couldn’t pay his bill. He told a story of living in a “shack in Tennessee,” having so little money that he could not afford to buy toothpaste when he ran out, only to discover a free sample of toothpaste in his mailbox. “Just when things were really, really bleak something would happen,” he said. Many authors jump or weep for joy upon receiving the word from Winfrey, publishing’s swiftest and surest path to the top of best seller lists. But McCarthy’s apparent indifference to having hundreds of thousands of new readers baffled and charmed the talk show host. “You are a different kind of author, let me tell you,” she said, chuckling.

I hope so much to be like this man! What an inspiration! He’s got it all – no contact with the press, he can write well, he’s got vision, he expresses himself, and he walks the walk! Good for him! Cormac McCarthy meet Mike McMannes – I think I can be better than he is. Mike McMannes is a better writer than Cormac McCarthy! (You gotta see it – you gotta believe it!)

http://cormacmccarthy.com/

The Human Being Re-Invented!

Biologists Make Skin Cells Work Like Stem Cells

By NICHOLAS WADE

In a surprising advance that could sidestep the ethical debates surrounding stem cell biology, researchers have come much closer to a major goal of regenerative medicine, the conversion of a patient’s cells into specialized tissues that might replace those lost to disease. The advance is an easy-to-use technique for reprogramming a skin cell of a mouse back to the embryonic state. Embryonic cells can be induced in the laboratory to develop into many of the body’s major tissues.

If the technique can be adapted to human cells, researchers could use a patient’s skin cells to generate new heart, liver or kidney cells that might be transplantable and would not be rejected by the patient’s immune system. But scientists say they cannot predict when they can overcome the considerable problems in adapting the method to human cells. The technique, if adaptable to human cells, is much easier to apply than nuclear transfer, would not involve the expensive and controversial use of human eggs, and should avoid all or almost all of the ethical criticism directed at the use of embryonic stem cells.

“From the point of view of moving biomedicine and regenerative medicine faster, this is about as big a deal as you could imagine,” said Irving Weissman, a leading stem cell biologist at Stanford University, who was not involved in the new research.

David Scadden, a stem cell biologist at the Harvard Medical School, said the finding that cells could be reprogrammed with simple biochemical techniques “is truly extraordinary and frankly something most assumed would take a decade to work out.”

Beyond that is the hope of generating cells for therapy. Researchers have learned how to make embryonic cells in the laboratory develop into neurons, heart muscle cells and other tissues. In principle, these might be injected into a patient to replace or supplement the cells of the diseased tissue, without fear of immune rejection. Still, repairing the body with its own cells should in principle be a superior form of medicine to the surgeon’s knife and the oncologists’ poisons. But the first fruit of the new technique will be in figuring out how cells work.

This and other methods will lead to an explosion of information that will “open the door for understanding how cells program and re-program their fate,” Dr. Scadden predicted. If and when applicable to human cells, he said, the four-gene approach “will have profound implications for new biology, regenerative medicine and will change the ethical debate around stem cells.”

Holocaust Diary of 14-Year-Old Dubbed the ‘Polish Anne Frank’ Unveiled

Monday , June 04, 2007

JERUSALEM — The diary of a 14-year-old Jewish girl, dubbed the “Polish Anne Frank,” was unveiled Monday by Israel’s Holocaust museum more than 60 years after the teenager vividly described the world crumbling around her as she came of age in a Jewish ghetto.
“The rope around us is getting tighter and tighter,” Rutka Laskier wrote in 1943, shortly before she was deported to Auschwitz. “I’m turning into an animal waiting to die.”
Within a few months Rutka was dead and, it seemed, her diary lost. But last year, a Polish friend who had saved the notebook finally came forth, exposing a riveting historical document.
“Rutka’s Notebook” is both a daily account of the horrors of the Holocaust in Bedzin, Poland, and a scrapbook detailing the life of a teenager in extraordinary circumstances. The 60-page memoir includes innocent adolescent banter, concerns and first loves — combined with a cold analysis of the fate of European Jewry.

Some 6 million Jews were killed by the Nazis during World War II, after European Jews were herded into ghettos, banned from most jobs and forced to wear yellow stars to identify them.
“I simply can’t believe that one day I will be allowed to leave this house without the yellow star. Or even that this war will end one day. If this happens I will probably lose my mind from joy,” she wrote on Feb. 5, 1943. “The little faith I used to have has been completely shattered. If God existed, He would have certainly not permitted that human beings be thrown alive into furnaces, and the heads of little toddlers be smashed with gun butts or shoved into sacks and gassed to death.”

The following day she opened her entry with a heated description of her hatred toward her Nazi tormentors. But then, in an effortless transition, she described her crush on a boy named Janek and the anticipation of a first kiss. “I think my womanhood has awoken in me. That means, yesterday when I was taking a bath and the water stroked my body, I longed for someone’s hands to stroke me,” she wrote. “I didn’t know what it was, I have never had such sensations until now.” Later that day, she shifted back to her harsh reality, describing how she watched as a Nazi soldier tore a Jewish baby away from his mother and killed him with his bare hands.

The diary chronicles Rutka’s life from January to April 1943. She shared it with her friend Stanislawa Sapinska, who she met after Rutka’s family moved into a home owned by Sapinska’s family, which had been confiscated by the Nazis to be included in the Bedzin ghetto. Sapinska came to inspect the house and the girls — one Jewish, one Christian — formed a deep bond.
When Rutka feared she would not survive, she told her friend about the diary. Sapinska offered to hide it in the basement under the floorboards. After the war, she returned to reclaim it.
“She wanted me to save the diary,” Sapinska, now in her 80s, recalled Monday. “She said ‘I don’t know if I will survive, but I want the diary to live on, so that everyone will know what happened to the Jews.’”

Sapinska stashed the diary in her home library for more than 60 years. She said it was a precious memento and thought it to be too private to share with others. Only at the behest of her young nephew did she agree to hand it over last year. “He convinced me that it was an important historical artifact,” she said in Polish. In 1943, Rutka was the same age as Anne Frank, the Dutch teenager whose Holocaust diary has become one of the most widely read books in the world. Yad Vashem said Rutka’s newly discovered diary was authenticated by experts and Holocaust survivors. Rutka’s father, Yaakov, was the family’s only survivor. He died in 1986. But unlike Anne Frank’s father, he kept his painful past inside. After the war, he moved to Israel, where he started a new family. His Israeli daughter, Zahava Sherz, said her father never spoke of his other children, and the diary introduced her to the long-lost family she never knew.
“I was struck by this deep connection to Rutka,” said Sherz, 57. “I was an only child, and now I suddenly have an older sister. This black hole was suddenly filled, and I immediately fell in love with her.”

“I have a feeling that I am writing for the last time,” Rutka wrote on Feb. 20, 1943, as Nazi soldiers began gathering Jews outside her home for deportation. “I wish it would end already! This torment; this is hell. I try to escape from these thoughts of the next day, but they keep haunting me like nagging flies. If only I could say, it’s over, you only die once … but I can’t, because despite all these atrocities, I want to live, and wait for the following day.”

However, Rutka would write again. Her last entry was dated April 24, 1943, and her last written words were: “I’m very bored. The entire day I’m walking around the room. I have nothing to do.”
In August, she and her family were sent to Auschwitz, where she is believed to have been killed upon arrival.

"No Friend of Mine?"

Michael Jackson: new song surfaces!
‘No Friend Of Mine’ appears on the internet

A new Michael Jackson song has surfaced on the internet.The song, ‘No Friend Of Mine (Gangsta)’, is available on DJ Tempamental’s Myspace.The track also features Fugees member Pras.It is the first new material that has appeared from Jackson since since 2001’s ‘Invincible’ album.It was rumoured that Jackson has been working on tracks with Black Eyed Peas member Will.i.am, but this has not been confirmed.

CLICK HERE TO PLAY TRACK

THE BITCH IS BACK!! ‘NESSIE’ Re-appears!

An amateur scientist caught the footage this past Saturday.EDINBURGH, Scotland (AP) — Here she comes! In what Loch Ness Monster watchers say is among the finest footage ever taken of the elusive mythical creature, ‘Nessie’ returns – and the whole world is watching!”

Much like an overgrown, sea-faring Greta Garbo, Nessie has always been a lady to shy away from public scrutiny, even though she is an emblem AND a true tourist draw. But if Nessie was more of a talker, I’m sure she would’ve found irresistable the TWO WORDS used by Michael Jordan upon his return to the NBA after toiling around baseball’s minor leagues.

“I’m Back!”

Reputed to swim beneath the waters of Scotland’s most mysterious lake, Nessie has re-emerged from the depths of the Loch. (Watch the ‘monster’ footage ) “I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw this jet black thing, about 45-feet (15 meters) long, moving fairly fast in the water,” said Gordon Holmes, the 55-year-old a lab technician from Shipley, Yorkshire, who took the video this past Saturday. He said it moved at about 6 mph (10 kph) and kept a fairly straight course.
“My initial thought is it could be a very big eel, they have serpent-like features and they may explain all the sightings in Loch Ness over the years.” Loch Ness is surrounded by myth and mystery, as it is the largest and deepest inland expanse of water in Britain. About 750 feet (230 meters) to the bottom, it’s even deeper than the North Sea.

Nessie watcher and marine biologist Adrian Shine of the Loch Ness 2000 center in Drumnadrochit, on the shores of the lake, viewed the video and hopes to properly analyze it in the coming months. “I see myself as a skeptical interpreter of what happens in the loch, but I do keep an open mind about these things and there is no doubt this is some of the best footage I have seen,” Shine said. He said the video is particularly useful because Holmes panned back to get the background shore into the shot. That means it was less likely to be a fake and provided geographical bearings allowing one to calculate how big the creature was and how fast it was traveling. While many sightings can be attributed to a drop of the local whisky, legends of Scottish monsters date back to one of the founders of the Christian church in Scotland, St. Columba, who wrote of them in about 565 A.D. More recently, there have been more than 4,000 purported Nessie sightings since she was first caught on camera by a surgeon on vacation in the 1930s.

Story Highlights

• An amateur scientist has captured new video footage of the Loch Ness Monster
• “Nessie” was first captured on video in the 1930s
• There have been more than 4,000 purported sightings since then!

Since then, the faithful have speculated whether it is a completely unknown species, a sturgeon — even though they have not been native to Scotland’s waters for many years — or even a last surviving dinosaur. Shine doubts that last explanation. “There are a number of possible explanations to the sightings in the loch. It could be some biological creature, it could just be the waves of the loch or it could be some psychological phenomenon in as much as we see what we want to see,” he said. The Scottish media is skeptical of Nessie stories but Holmes’ footage is of such good quality that even the normally reticent BBC Scotland aired the video on its main news program on Tuesday.

Click below for video:

COULD THIS BE MORE PROOF??