Fauna.

The first intact male colossal squid was caught off the Antarctic coast (money quote: "calamari rings the size of tractor tires") and bees are being raptured away.

Update: The breakup of the Antarctic ice shelf is revealing new species in a formerly inaccessible ecosystem. Guess we'd better catalog them now before they all go extinct.

How Helpful

An acquaintance once remarked on the economy of rural versus urban living that as a country dweller, off the public plumbing, at least I "didn't have to pay a water bill". Well, it ain't quite so simple. Several years ago, not long after painfully pulling my mortgage muscle to acquire a beautiful stretch in the country, I fell victim to a receding water table. A well on every five acres had taken its toll on the groundwater supply in this swath of rural North Carolina. There's not a hell of a lot you can do when your well runs dry. You've got two choices: drill, or move.

We went deep and hit a gusher, 65+ GPM, which was good. But it was full of sediment and minerals, which was bad but not as bad as if it was contaminated with microorganisms or other hazards. After installation of the filtration system, I got the clean bill from the health department. About a week later I got the $13,000 bill from the water company. All this, of course, added only marginally to the value of the real estate investment; any buyer expects water to flow from the tap.

So trust me, living in the country does not mean not having a water bill.

Fortunately now, as we wait for the real estate bubble to burst and a buyers' market to emerge from the ashes, our property manager dutifully pays our monthly water bill. This is karmic return; while our family is only twice the size it was in 1999, the addition of a 2-year and a 7-year old has increased the laundry and dishwashing requirements approximately 30-fold. At least. But this effects my budget none.

But the water does taste a little... funny. When we moved here two years ago, it was immediately apparent that we would need bottled drinking water. We shopped and found three competitors providing 6-gallon carboys, renting stands and dispensers if we needed. We tried one and stuck with the second. I found it disconcerting over the next year, however, that these 'competitors' were... 'joining forces' and 'partnering' in order to provide me 'better service'. A monopoly was on the horizon and that can really only mean one thing.

And I got it in the mail today. I shall quote: "Crystal Mountain Waters / Sierra Springs / Alhambra is introducing a new, lighter, 5 gallon, handled bottle." Oh, joy of joys! A gallon less than the 6-gallon bottles I'm used to. I feel so liberated from that extra 8 pounds of lifting per bottle. And what's even better, "these easy-to-use bottles contain the same natural spring water and are compatible with your spill proof cooler." I'm delighted.

Then I check the bill. Previously the cost was $8.05 for a 6-gallon bottle. Now it's $8.05 for a 5-gallon bottle. Hmm. A 20% price increase presented as an extraordinary customer service. Slap some lipstick on that pig, boys, and get her a date!

Terra firma.

Good god, what a nightmare.

Emergency crews on Saturday found a third body in a 330-foot-deep sinkhole that had swallowed a dozen homes and forced the evacuation of nearly 1,000 people in a crowded Guatemala City neighborhood. The body of Domingo Soyos, 53, was carried out of the enormous fissure and identified by family members, medical crews said. Soyos was the father of teenagers Irma and David Soyos, whose bodies were found floating in a river of sewage soon after the sinkhole opened on Friday. [...]

Officials blamed recent rains and an underground sewage flow from a ruptured main for the tragedy. The pit emitted foul odors, loud noises and tremors, shaking the surrounding ground. A rush of water could be heard from its depths, and authorities feared it could widen or other sinkholes could open up.

Uh oh.

Chimps are making spears. (via)

Quick hits.

"Keep it short, and don't mention sex or drunkenness -- those are the new rules for eulogies at funeral masses in Australia's Catholic church."

"A Romanian woman needed medical help after she swallowed her lover's false teeth during a moment of passion. [...] Eventually she admitted she gulped down the denture while experimenting a 'special type of passionate kiss' with her boyfriend."

It was too called a bucket of bones when I was an undergrad, and it really isn't the same without Billy calling you names. Memories...

An interesting post (with many good links) on storing information in the DNA of bacteria.

Waste not, want not: How to make bacon soap.

I'm in you.

Since folks seemed confused by Froz's post below that contained no mutations, injuries, or gross-out factor, I'll toss a link up to this completely fascinating post from Carl Zimmer about tapeworms (thanks, cw!).

Ringo

Mustang meet world, world meet mustang.

I can run

That good stuff

I'm ready for my closeup

He seems OK

And if Mama says he's OK

He must be OK

Family portrait

I am ready

Daddy's little smartass.

Last night, I took home a stack of reports I'm editing, mostly about studies involving viral loads in this or that breed of mice. All very dry and scientific and filled with phrases like "intracellular IFN-γ-specific TCR-double positive splenocytes" and the like. I picked up Keegan at the afterschool program and handed them to him to hold on the ride home. Shortly afterwards, I noticed he was scanning over the front page of the top one.

"Wow, this looks really complicated."

"Yeah, it is. Makes for some pretty slow editing."

"You must be really smart."

He waited just long enough for me to start to puff up a little before adding, "Not smart enough to get a fun job, but still."

He's still black, he's just lucky.

Red State Update on the current crop of presidential candidates (and the prequel).

Another update on an old story.

Almost two years ago, I linked to a story about a priest in Romania who was charged with a nun's murder after chaining and tying her, gagged, to a cross for days without food or water as part of an exorcism ritual. The trial has now ended, and the priest received 14 years in prison, while four other nuns received five to eight year sentences. Just comparing the pictures of Father Daniel at the time of the arrest and now, I can't wait to see what his beard looks like in 14 years.

Stumpy, the four-legged duckling!

Quack.

A pair best taken out of context.

"He served several stretches in jail, and most recently a stint in prison. He's out now, and I understand the testicles have started to appear on fences again."

NYTimes: "The word 'scrotum' does not often appear in polite conversation. Or children's literature, for that matter. Yet there it is on the first page of 'The Higher Power of Lucky,' by Susan Patron, this year's winner of the Newbery Medal, the most prestigious award in children's literature. [...] 'The word is just so delicious,' Ms. Patron said."

The Only Thing Sillier

Republican evasive-maneuver-slash-talking-point number one for the last four days has been the meaninglessness of the anti-surge resolution.

Is it lost on anyone that the only thing sillier than a non-binding resolution that, although it accurately reflects the majority opinion in this country, accompanies a foregone conclusion that it will be completely ignored by the most stubbornly delusional president in history is... um...

Filibustering that same non-binding resolution that, although it accurately reflects the majority opinion in this country, accompanies a foregone conclusion that it will be completely ignored by the most stubbornly delusional president in history.

I suppose the strategy is: if we just stick our fingers deeper in our ears and talk ever louder to ourselves, reality will change. I'm tempted to give Nancy Pelosi some credit for making these people look incredibly dumb but I suppose she had a lot of material to work with.

Personal items.

We took Noah out to Celebrity Dairy to see all the new baby goats, and I'll be damned but goo-covered baby goats were plopping to the ground everywhere you turned. It was bizarre. Also, ginormous peacock sitting in the rafters watching over everything. Very cool.

But then coming back, I managed to earn a ticket for going 74 in a 55 out on middle-of-nowhere Hwy 64. I know there are at least 3 NC lawyers that drop by here and many more NCers with traffic court experience, right? I've only been to traffic court once, in Raleigh about five or six years ago, having just mailed in the money for previous tickets. When I actually showed up in person, it seemed like they just lined you up, dropped the charge to 9 over the speed limit, you plead guilty, they offer you the prayer for judgment, and you're on your way. I didn't take the PFJ then, thinking maybe it would be better to save it.

So anyhow, is this something I need to get a flesh-and-blood attorney for to keep my insurance from spiraling upward, or is the drop-it-nine-over dance SOP in Chatham County, too? Help me, interwebs!

Also, we got the scores for Keegan's Midyear Benchmark Assessment for science. The sheet informed us that of 2279 Durham County 4th graders who took the test, no students scored higher, four students scored the same, and 2274 students had a lower score. Which makes me very proud.

Click.

The 2007 World Press Photo winners have been announced and while the pictures are indeed amazing, they're almost relentlessly grim. The winners' galleries are here. I was especially struck by the psychiatric inmates in Burundi and the DRC, the street dancers frozen in mid-air, the amputee soccer team, and the Big Brother presence of Turkmenistan's president. Also, one of the saddest portraits I've ever seen.

Finger-lickin' good.

I loves me some Thai food. Or perhaps I just love Americanized versions of Thai food. Following a link from Pharyngula, I happened upon a website of obscure Thai delicacies, including snake and lizard whiskeys, assorted frog meals, and various insects packaged every which way. For my money, however, the winner would have to be the Juicy Preserved Pregnant Crickets, which are described as "tasty," "packed full of eggs," and "extremely nutritious." Which may all be true, but I'm having trouble getting past the "juicy" part.

Black Jesus has good taste in women.

Jesus is back! But his methodology seems a little different this time around.

Teller nullification.

Updating an old story: you may remember this post from last fall, about the Pizza Pit delivery guy who forgot to take his marijuana out of the bank deposit bag before dropping it in the slot. The prosecutor in the case has asked the judge to drop the charges because the delivery guy went to the bank the next day and got his weed back.

"The bank teller gave the marijuana back to him so we didn't have any evidence," Tiffany said. "She was smart enough to call police, but then she gave it back to him."

If you loved me, you'd buy me one.

The world's first personal submarines are now available and for only $125,000. They dive to 50 meters and can stay underwater for 2.5 hours, with emergency air for 36 hours.

So cute and shiny! I want to lick them. The manufacturer's website is here.

Mark Allen Dickey has a point.

But nobody's quite certain what it is.

An Oregon television station had to be evacuated on Thursday after a man parked a van daubed in slogans outside, took his shirt off and waved flares around. In addition to the slogans – some of which read 'I ♥ Napalm-Morning', 'I have classified information', and 'Matthew 25:31-46' – the van had a red petrol can on the roof with wires attached to it. According to reports, the man – identified as Mark Allen Dickey – drove up to the KTVL Channel 10 offices in Meford, Oregon early in the morning, and shouted 'Get the hell out of here. It's real.'

It subsequently turned out not to be real.

Police evacuated the nearby offices and closed off the area, with a bomb squad and swat team called in to deal with the situation. A five-hour stand-off ensued, during which time Dickey took his shirt off and let of flares a number of times. The siege finally ended after a robot delivered Dickey a mobile phone so that he could speak with negotiators. The SWAT team managed to rush him when he left the van. He has been charged with disorderly conduct, menacing and possession of a hoax destructive device.

Investigators are still trying to determine why this occurred in Oregon instead of Florida.

Purely Academic in Nature

...political connotations should not be attributed to it. Sigh. If only it was that simple.

But Really...

What's all that impressive about making a pulse of light disappear in a cloud whose molecules vibrate in quantum tandem and then reappear somewhere else? Not much to write home about, really, it's more... just... "odd"...

"It's odd," says atomic physicist Lene Hau, the team's leader. "We can actually revive the light pulse and send it back on its way as if nothing had happened." Besides being a neat quantum game of catch, Hau speculates that the technique may someday be used in optical communications or ultraprecise navigation systems.

Or... Huge Lockheed Martin R&D contracts and planetary-enslaving death-rays, but what's the difference?

Blowing & Drinking Horns

Bad News Hughes goes to the Ren Faire.

Symballic.

This story from Salon more or less sums up our mission in Iraq. In an effort to establish some good will with local Iraqis, the Army decided to have soldiers give out soccer balls to kids. When they arrived to unload the five-ton truck, there was one problem: the balls weren't inflated, and there were no pumps or needles to get air into them.

Frustrated, the soldiers asked their commanding officers what to do. None were sure. They kept calling their own superiors. Cassidy suggested that they order pumps and needles, which would arrive in about two weeks. The battalion colonel quickly tired of the whole discussion and said he wasn't about to requisition soccer ball pumps. "He decided this was a waste of time," Cassidy said. "His thought was, 'Iraqis should be grateful.' Not, 'They will be grateful' -- 'They should be.'" Finally, the lieutenant commanded the troops to deliver the balls to the children. "He was pretty much like, 'Shut up and hand out these soccer balls,'" Reppenhagen said.

It seemed crazy. "We were so pissed," said Reppenhagen. But orders are orders. When you are told to hand out flat soccer balls, you hand out flat soccer balls. So the soldiers who served in 2nd Battalion, 63rd Armored Regiment piled the flat soccer balls into their Humvees. Driving through the Sunni Triangle's war-torn towns, they tossed the deflated balls to children, who crowded the sides of the roads, running beside the canals and lush greenery that lined the banks of the Diyala River. "Kids were swarming us," Reppenhagen said. "We went to a couple of schools and delivered stacks of them. Everybody we saw got a flat soccer ball."

Which, of course, the kids quickly figured out. Pretty soon, Reppenhagen recalled, "They were like, 'What are you doing? What are we supposed to do with this?" When the Humvees began to retrace their route back to the base, the futility of the operation was becoming painfully clear. "Kids were wearing these soccer balls as hats," Reppenhagen said. "They were kicking them around. They were in trees. They were floating in canals. They were everywhere. There were so many soccer balls. [...] On the way back, kids were throwing rocks at us."

In a nutshell.

The right thing to do.

Steve Jobs calls on the music industry to do away with DRM altogether.

Quick hits.

Nobody tells this Wookiee what to do.

Bent objects. (via)

Titan's north pole is being covered by a cloud half the size of the United States.

The calf with two faces died Friday.

Things that get more fun when you add a G.

"A naked man arrested for beating a car with a dead pigeon last summer was sentenced to a year in prison Monday for animal cruelty."

Houston, we have a problem.

I link to a lot of space stories here—or I did back when I wrote here a lot—but not one of them was ever as crazy as this one.

A NASA astronaut is being held without bail after police say she attacked her rival for another astronaut's attention at Orlando International Airport Monday. Lisa Marie Nowak drove more than 12 hours from Texas to meet the 1 a.m. flight of a younger woman who had also been seeing the astronaut Nowak pined for, according to Orlando police.

Nowak -- who was a mission specialist on a Space Shuttle Discovery flight last summer -- was wearing a trench coat and wig and had a knife, BB pistol, and latex gloves in her car, reports show. They also found diapers, which Nowak said she used so she wouldn't have to stop on the 1,000-mile drive. Reports show that after U.S. Air Force Capt. Colleen Shipman's flight arrived, Nowak followed her to the airport's Blue Lot for long-term parking, tried to get into Shipman's car and then doused her with pepper spray. [...] A steel mallet, several feet of rubber tubing and hand-written directions to Shipman's home were recovered from Nowak's car, which was parked at a nearby LaQuinta Inn, reports show.

Via Farber.

Mixed messages.

He loves me, he loves me not...

A woman from Pittsburgh was surprised to find a package left on her doorstep by her ex-boyfriend. On the plus side, it was nicely wrapped in red bows and pink tissue paper, and came with a note saying 'I love you, Your Ben'. On the down side, it contained the severed head of a kitten.

Light show!

Fireworks, lightning, and a comet, all in the same photograph.

Satan wants a recount.

There are bad poll numbers and then there's this.

(via)

Barbecue made the way God intended it.

Local pork royalty Allen&Sons make the Los Angeles Times.

Identification

Kos links to results from the averages of all 2006 Gallup polling that show party ID is surging toward the Democrats. The overall 34D-30R-34I split is the Democrats' biggest national advantage since Clinton was in office. Taking independent leaners into account, Dem/lean Dem get 50%, GOP/lean GOP is at 40%. That's the largest gap for either party since leaners began being included in 1991 and the first time either party has hit 50%. But those aren't the most interesting numbers to me; the state-by-state party IDs are. A list of the 48 continental states, ranked from most Democratic to least, is behind the cut.

A few surprising notes: Missouri at #11 and Kentucky at #17 of the most heavily Democratic states. North Carolina and Florida are tied with California. And GOP (w/ leaners) only holds any lead at all in Mississippi, South Dakota, South Carolina, Texas, Nebraska, Idaho, and Utah.

Quick Hits

Islamic Pakistan gets its own single malt whiskey, but only non-Muslim minorities are allowed to buy it. Sucks to be you, majority. Whiskey rocks.

Human cheese would get around the vegan objection, but would cost $200 a pound and might not even be possible due to its low protein content. Sucks to be you, vegans. Cheese rocks.

Schoolyard penis seen from space.

Japanese German extreme parking.

Delonte West is an enigma.

The Mooninites are coming! The Mooninites are coming! I find it awesome that Aqua Teen Hunger Force shut down Boston but God, we have become a nation of bedwetters.

It is a pretty stunning house, if you've got $34 million dollars lying around.