Nate Edel's blog
Scientists can’t get sloth to move
JENA, Germany – Scientists in the eastern German city of Jena said Wednesday they have finally given up after three years of failed attempts to entice a sloth into budging as part of an experiment in animal movement.
Alrighty-then.
A post on Making Light tracks BBC “obsession” with hamsters, and this one story caught my attention:
Hamster back from the dead
Three-year-old Claudia had gone to the great cage in the sky. Or so it seemed.
For despite being buried in her makeshift coffin three feet below the ground, the plucky rodent was determined not to give up on life just yet.
She gnawed her way out of the box and burrowed up to the surface, before making her way back home.
via a post on DailyKos (probably C&J?)
Woman Survives Being Locked Up in Barrel and Thrown Into Sea by Jealous Husband
A Russian banker sealed his wife in a barrel and threw her into the sea when the couple were on vacation on Crimea Peninsula in Ukraine, the Pervaya Krymskaya newspaper reports.
City Settles Flour-Filled Condom Lawsuit
(AP) PHILADELPHIA A woman who was arrested and jailed for three weeks on drug charges for what turned out to be flour-filled condoms has settled a lawsuit against the city for $180,000.
Scorpion bites man repeatedly on plane to Vermont
A scorpion bit David Sullivan on the back of his right leg, just below the knee, then crawled up and down his left leg, he thinks, before getting him again in the shin.
From various posts on Flyertalk. And one extra, from elsewhere:
Australia-bound tourist ends up in Montana
German man mistakenly books plane ticket to small oil town of Sidney
BERLIN – A 21-year-old German tourist who wanted to visit his girlfriend in the Australian metropolis Sydney landed more than 8,000 miles away near Sidney, Montana, after mistyping his destination on a flight booking Web site.
Civil court judges prepare to cast aside their wigs after 300 years
· Review finds consensus that horsehair should go
· Criminal courts may retain traditional headgear
Pooping Peasant Popular in Spain
‘El Caganer,’ the Great Defecating Peasant Increasingly Found on Mantelpieces in Spain
BARCELONA, Spain Dec 20, 2006 (AP)— The Virgin Mary. The three kings. A few wayward sheep. These are the figures one expects to find in a traditional Christmas nativity scene. Not a smartly dressed peasant squatting behind a rock with his rear-end exposed.
Yet statuettes of “El Caganer,” or the great defecator in the Catalan language, can be found in nativity scenes, and increasingly on the mantelpieces of collectors, throughout Spain’s northeastern Catalonia region, where for centuries symbols of defecation have played an important role in Christmas festivities.
I couldn’t MAKE this stuff up, folks. More craziness from the same site: Caller impersonates cop, convinces McDonalds crew to abuse coworker
Headline: “Finland’s ‘sexiest man’ ends romance with txt msg”
Yawn. Just like Britney, some celebrity scandal. Well, let’s take a look anyway:
Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen, dubbed Finland’s sexiest man, broke up by text message with the girlfriend he had met on the Internet, she said in a magazine interview.
(emphasis mine) Prime minister??? You mean like their head of state… oops head of their government? (Can’t remember what sort of head of state Finland has.)
Yes, I know the Finns are way cooler than us Yankees, but this one still boggled me. Single PM, dating? Dating from the internet? Dumping the gal via text message? And the US still stuck with the religious reich making noises that it’s inappropriate to have a divorced president… gah, sucks to be us.
German sex educators plan spray-on condom
Thu Nov 30, 2006 11:25am ET
BERLIN (Reuters) – German sex educators plan to launch a spray-on condom tailor-made for all sizes.Jan Vinzenz Krause from the Institute for Condom Consultancy, a Singen-based practice that offers advice on condom use, told Reuters on Thursday the product aimed to help people enjoy better and safer sex lives.
“We’re trying to develop the perfect condom for men that’s suited to every size of penis,” he said. “We’re very serious.”
Krause’s team (spraykondom.de) is developing a type of spray can into which the man inserts his penis first. At the push of a button it is then coated in a rubber condom.
I have nothing to add.
Oh, wait… that’s poisoning pigeons, not swallowing them…
Pelican swallows pigeon in park
Last Updated: Wednesday, 25 October 2006, 10:06 GMT 11:06 UK
Families and tourists in a London park were left shocked when a pelican picked up and swallowed a pigeon.
The unusual wildlife spectacle in St James’s Park was caught on camera by photographer Cathal McNaughton.
Sorry for yet another late post, this and the Thailand one I dropped a link into here when fresh and never got around to posting it.
Darn pandas! Back in the news again…
Panda Bites Off Part of Woman’s Thumb
A panda cub bit off part of the thumb of an American visitor who was feeding it at a reserve in southwest China, state media said Thursday.
The 50-year-old woman, identified only as Lisa, had registered in the Wolong Giant Panda Protection and Research Center in Sichuan province as a volunteer, the official Xinhua News Agency said.
She was wearing gloves and feeding the panda bamboo on Tuesday morning when “suddenly, the panda bit into her thumb,” Xinhua said.
And then we get weirdness from The Register, citing some guy whosays that H.G. Wells was right on the money
Bad news for believers in the “singularity”. Instead of accelerating us into a race of cosmic superbeings, our reliance on technology will turn humans into a species of domesticated pets: docile and anti-social.
So says Oliver Curry, a sociobiologist attached to the London School of Economics. A technology-dependent human race of the future will be obese, have weak immune systems, and be incapable of socializing, empathizing or performing team work, suggests Curry. A bit like the “Web 2.0 blogger” of today.
He also predicted that the human race will split into two species, resembling the future inhabitants of earth in HG Wells’ Time Machine. There’ll be an underclass of ugly, dim-witted goblins (the Morlocks), and a eugenically-pure species of intelligent, 7-foot tall beauties (Wells’s Elois) – each one doubtless capable of landing a tenured post at the London School of Economics – or making baseless evolutionary predictions at the drop of a commercial sponsor’s shilling.
And there’s more, showing that IT publications aren’t always dull: People more drunk at weekends, researchers discover (21 April 2006) … for which I’ll spare you the blurb.
Yes, I know things are getting a little long in the tooth here for the promised “reboot” or even just posting more often. Sorry. It’s coming soon, I hope.
MSNBC has a section on “Animal Peculiarity“.
I found “Man bites panda in Beijing zoo as retribution” via their front page, which in turn led to that section. (I’m resisting the urge to file this under “morons” – my point is on the section, not on the Chinese fellow who wanted to pet a panda.)
It also features such wonderful headlines as: “He done her chicken wrong … allegedly” and “Never hug a Swiss cow, hikers told”
Alrighty-then.
In other potentially tasty but equally trivial news, McDonald’s considers selling breakfast all day. I for one would quite enjoy being able to get a Big Breakfast (eggs, sausage patty, and biscuit) for lunch.
World’s first hypo-allergenic cat
Sept. 18 – There’s a new solution for cat lovers allergic to cats.
San Diego based company Allerca says it has successfully produced the world’s first hypoallergenic cat, something that could allow allergic pet lovers to enjoy cats again.
Paivthra George reports.
SOUNDBITE: Stephen May, Allerca Spokesperson