Things that make you say "Oh my

Tallest Man Takes On Tall Order: Marriage

Tallest Man Takes On Tall Order: Marriage

Bride Found After Worldwide Search

The world's tallest man is now also the world's tallest groom. Bao Xishun, a 7-foot-9 herdsman from Inner Mongolia, got married Thursday. After a worldwide search for a bride, Bao found his lady love in his hometown.

She's Xia Shujian, a saleswoman who's more than 2 feet shorter. It was a traditional Mongolian ceremony, with one exception. Bao didn't have to kneel and touch his head to ground.

The official China news agency said the sign of respect to Bao's parents and new in-laws was skipped because of his extraordinary height and bad knees.

The Oops Factor!

PLANES you've never ever seen before

The New 7 Seven Wonders of the World are Named

The winners of the contest to name the new seven wonders of the world. The pyramids in Giza will retain their status as one of the original seven wonders of the world.

PYRAMIDS OF GIZA, EGYPT
The only surviving structures of the original seven wonders, the three pyramids were built as tombs for 4th dynasty pharaohs about 4,500 years ago. The largest of the three pyramids, the 452-foot-high Great Pyramid, was built for King Cheops. Nearby is the Great Sphinx, a limestone statue with the face of a man and the body of a lion.

COLOSSEUM, ITALY
The giant amphitheater in Rome was inaugurated in A.D. 80 by the Emperor Titus in a ceremony of games lasting 100 days. The 50,000-seat Colosseum, which has influenced the design of modern sports stadiums, was an arena where thousands of gladiators dueled to the death and Christians were fed to the lions.

GREAT WALL OF CHINA
The 4,160-mile barricade running from east to west in northern China is the longest man-made structure in the world. The fortification, which largely dates from the 7th through the 4th century B.C., was built to protect the dynasties from invasion by the Huns, Mongols, Turks and other nomadic tribes.

TAJ MAHAL, INDIA
The white marble-domed mausoleum in Agra was built by Mogul Emperor Shah Jahan between 1632 and 1654 for his favorite wife, Mumtaz Mahal, who died in childbirth. The complex - an example of Mughal architecture combining Indian, Persian, and Islamic styles - houses the graves of the emperor and his wife, as well as those of lesser royalty.

PETRA, JORDAN
The ancient city of Petra in southwestern Jordan, built on a terrace around the Wadi Musa or Valley of Moses, was the capital of the Arab kingdom of the Nabateans. It also flourished under Roman rule after the Nabateans were defeated in A.D. 106. The city is famous for its water tunnels and numerous stone structures carved in rock, the most impressive of which is probably Ad-Dayr, an uncompleted tomb facade that served as a church during Byzantine times.

CHRIST THE REDEEMER STATUE, BRAZIL
The 125-foot-tall statue of Christ the Redeemer with outstretched arms overlooks Rio de Janeiro from atop Mt. Corcovado. The statue, which weighs more than 1,000 tons, was built by Polish-French sculptor Paul Landowski in pieces in France starting in 1926, then shipped to Brazil. The pieces were carried by cogwheel railway up the mountain for assembly. The statue was inaugurated in 1931.

MACHU PICCHU, PERU
Built by the Incan Empire in the 15th century, the giant walls, palaces, temples and dwellings of the Machu Picchu sanctuary are perched in the clouds at 8,000 feet above sea level in the Andes mountains. It remains a mystery how the huge stones were moved into place for the construction of the remote city.

PYRAMID AT CHICHEN ITZA, MEXICO
This step-pyramid surmounted by a temple survives from a sacred site that was part of one of the greatest Mayan centers of Mexico's Yucatan peninsula. Built according to the solar calendar, it is placed so that shadows cast at the fall and spring equinoxes are said to look like a snake crawling down the steps, similar to the carved serpent at the top.

Source: forbes.com

New Jeans in Japan

Airplane Oops

The Best "Out-Of-Office" E-Mail Auto-Replies

1: I am currently out at a job interview and will reply to you if I fail to get the position.

2: I'm not really out of the office. I'm just ignoring you.

3: You are receiving this automatic notification because I am out of the office. If I was in, chances are you wouldn't have received anything at all.

4: Sorry to have missed you but I am at the doctors having my brain removed so that I may be promoted to management.

5: I will be unable to delete all the unread, worthless emails you send me until I return from vacation on 4/18. Please be patient and your mail will be deleted in the order it was received.

6: Thank you for your email. Your credit card has been charged $5.99 for the first ten words and $1.99 for each additional word in your message.

7: The e-mail server is unable to verify your server connection and is unable to deliver this message. Please restart your computer and try sending again.
( The beauty of this is that when you return, you can see how many in-duh-viduals did this over and over)

8: Thank you for your message, which has been added to a queuing system. You are currently in 352nd place, and can expect to receive a reply in approximately 19 weeks.

9: Hi. I'm thinking about what you've just sent me. Please wait by your PC for my response.

10: Hi! I'm busy negotiating the salary for my new job. Don't bother to leave me any messages.

11: I've run away to join a different circus.

AND, FINALLY, THIS ONE TAKES THE CAKE:

12: I will be out of the office for the next 2 weeks for medical reasons. When I return, please refer to me as ' Loretta' instead of 'Steve'

Mammatus Clouds - Amazing, Rare & Beautiful

Ever seen anything like this?

Jorn Olsen works for the Dutton-Lainson Co. in Hastings, Nebraska, and lives by Heartwell Park next to Hastings College . The other night he took these photos . The stadium lights are at the Hastings College stadium just east of his home.

The clouds are called Mammatus clouds . They do not precede a tornado, or foretell a storm, but are formed when the air is already saturated with rain droplets and/or ice crystals and begins to sink. The worst of the storm is usually over when these kinds of clouds are seen.

They are quite rare, but really beautiful.

This is supposed to be one of the most beautiful Scenes in the Sky..

Apple launches iPhone in USA Markets

Thousands of US gadget fans flocked to stores on Friday to be the first buyers of Apple's iPhone, a music-playing and Web-browsing device expected to shake up the mobile industry.

Crowds lined up at some of Apple's outlets cheered as their doors opened at 6 p.m. local time, while smaller groups waited outside AT&T stores. AT&T Inc is the phone's exclusive wireless carrier for the first two years, which many early reviewers cited as the phone's biggest drawback.

"I haven't slept in a day and a half," said Grant Johnson, 41, an accountant from Brooklyn who was one of the first to walk out of Apple's Fifth Avenue outlet clutching the prize. "I need a nice hot shower and a bath."

Early hitches included a hiccup in AT&T's retail computer system that delayed some East Coast sales for 45 minutes, and a sluggish response from Apple's online store shortly after it began offering iPhones.

The iPhone melds a phone, Web browser and media player, and costs $500 to $600, depending on memory capacity. Technology gurus praised it as a 'breakthrough' device, but questioned whether users would be unhappy with shortcomings such as its lack of a hardware keyboard and pokey Internet link.

The light, svelte gadget is a gamble by Apple Inc co-founder and Chief Executive Steve Jobs to build upon his company's best-selling iPod music player and expand the market for its software and media services.

"They want to extend the dominance they have in terms of their ability to create really elegant hardware and software integration," said Mark McGuire, analyst with research firm Gartner. "This is the next big business unit for them." Apple aims to sell 10 million iPhones in 2008, which would amount to a 1 percent share of the global market. It has not given a sales goal for the launch, but some analysts said it could sell up to 400,000 units in the first few days.

What is less clear is whether sales will hold up once the initial excitement has waned.

Piper Jaffray said this month Apple could sell 45 million iPhones in 2009, which would put it on par in terms of revenue with its two key businesses, the Mac computer and the iPod.

Many analysts say Apple's share price could rise 30 per cent in the coming year if the phone catches on, but some cautioned that the shares are already richly valued. "Apple shares have already benefited from a powerful hype cycle," Cowen & Co analyst Arnie Berman wrote in a report. Shares of Apple rose 1.2 per cent to $122.04 on Friday and have gained more than 30 per cent since Jobs unveiled the phone in January. AT&T shares rose 1.9 per cent to $41.50.

SHAKING UP THE INDUSTRY

Talk of the iPhone rippled through the wireless industry before even a single unit had sold.
Ed Colligan, Chief Executive of rival Palm Inc, told Reuters on Thursday that sales of its Treo smartphone could 'stall' in the short term as people try out the iPhone. Apple is due to sell it in Europe in the run up to this year's holiday season. It has not disclosed the price or carrier, but speculation has mounted it may reach a deal with Vodafone Group Plc. Asian sales are expected in 2008.

Friday's launch, which whipped tech lovers into the sort of frenzy usually associated with a new video game console, was seen as a test of wider US demand for the sort of advanced phones that are already popular in parts of Asia and Europe. Judging by its first customers, the iPhone seemed to draw an older generation of gadget geeks rather than young fans who may have been put off by the price.

"The phones out there are just garbage. I've gone through several phones, even the expensive ones. This is different," said Albert Livingstone in Chicago. "It's the newest toy. I'm 62 -- I don't have much time left to buy toys." Although a service contract costing at least $1,400 over two years was widely thought to be mandatory, AT&T revealed to Reuters late on Friday that buyers with bad credit can obtain prepaid service, meaning they pay up front for call time.

Some early buyers aimed to make a profit on the iPhone by selling it or getting paid to wait.
At an Apple store in downtown San Francisco where about 500 people had gathered, one young man walked out with a phone and began shouting a price: "Fifteen-hundred, fifteen-hundred!" Many made good on their plans to try to flip the gadgets online, but easy profits appeared out of reach for most. Of the hundreds of phones listed on auction site eBay, the vast majority had failed to attract a single bid or were still well below the retail price.

In Hollywood, the event took on shades of another recent headline-grabbing phenomenon as Apple Vice President Greg Jozwiak emerged from a store to show off the device and was mobbed by the eager crowd.

"I now feel like Paris Hilton," Jozwiak joked.

Source: Expressindia.com

Largest shopping mall now on your computer

Having changed the way people communicate with products like e-mail and instant messaging, Internet is now playing a key role in the shopping pattern by bringing world's top brands under the click of the mouse.

While a number of companies seeking to sell their products on the world wide web are establishing their online stores, they are also warming up to another route being offered by firms like eBay, which presents itself to the buyers and sellers as ‘the world's biggest shopping mall’.

Promising access to over 20 lakh registered users across 670 cities and 25 lakh unique visitors a month in India alone, eBay is attracting brands like Microsoft, Canon and Sangini as well as small entrepreneurs to set up shops on its website.

The California-based online trading platform and auction giant, which has a market capitalisation of over 43 billion dollars and annual turnover of about six billion dollars, is providing similar platforms across all the major countries such as the US, UK and European nations. Indian portals like Indiatimes.Com and Rediff.Com also offer similar platform.

While the cost of setting up and running a store in a physical shopping mall could easily run into lakhs of rupees, an online shop comes at a fraction of this price and holds huge promise due to Internet's growing penetration.

"The cost for owning a retail store on eBay India is as low as Rs 200 per month, besides a fee equivalent to 5-10 per cent of the selling price for each product sold," the company's Country Manager Rajan Mehra said.

It could be a time-consuming and sometimes quite costly for setting up an online shop on its own for a retailer, while there are also variable costs associated with running the venture and attracting buyers, Mehra said.

Source: Expressindia.com