Looking for a list of the typical PTO dates for 2008? Yeah, I was, too. Here it is.
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I’d have to say that “the back seat of my car” is somewhere near the top of my list of Places Not to Keep an Alligator.

Anti-Shark Device Eaten by Irony-Loving Great White

“I would never had done any of this if I thought there would have been an accident.” — Jim Abernethy, Scuba Adventures

Right. Of course. You’re just dumping bloody fish chunks into the ocean and then letting people swim with really aggressive sharks. What could possibly go wrong?

In other news: Dave Davidson was the author of the study.

Here’s a classic from the Onion for today: Hijackers Surprised To Find Selves In Hell

Chewbacca Assaults Marilyn At Kodak Theater

People naturally worry about splashier threats, such as shark attacks. However, the Marons’ research found there were 16 sand hole or tunnel deaths in the United States from 1990 to 2006 compared with 12 fatal shark attacks for the same period, according to University of Florida statistics.

Renowned cat veterinarian and beloved Cornell University professor James Richards died Tuesday from injuries suffered in a motorcycle accident that occurred on Sunday.
Richards, the director of Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine’s Feline Health Center, was thrown from his motorcycle when he attempted to avoid a cat in the road.

There’s a neat story on SFGate.com about the 101^st anniversary of the San Francisco earthquake. This year only one man who was there at the time made it to the festivities, 104-yr old Herbert Hamrol. As far as I’m concerned, the most fascinating thing about the article is not that this man is over a century old. It’s not even that the old guy got out of bed at 2:30 in the morning to make it to the ceremony. It’s that it notes Hamrol took the day off work to attend. What the hell?! Retire, dude!

One of the all-time best stand-up comedians, Richard Jeni (official page, currently down), apparently committed suicide this weekend. My girlfriend and I read about his death on Perez last night as we were getting ready to watch Rome. Just the night before, while celebrating a friend’s birthday at the Dresden, a few of us were talking about his hysterical HBO special, A Big Steaming Pile Of Me, how difficult stand-up is, and how few real geniuses there are in the field.
I still have that show on the TiVo in the guest room. It will be that much harder to delete it now.

If you get an email with the subject line “Valentine’s Day eCard !” that looks like it came from AmericanGreetings <services@americangreetings.com>, it’s most likely a virus. I’m not even going to take a chance by clicking the link. The link appears to be to the americangreetings.com domain, but if you hover your mouse over it you’ll see that it’s really going to a different URL. Trickery!

You have to get out of bed pretty early to pull one over on the local coroner in Los Angeles.

Southern California kicker Mario Danelo was drunk when he plunged over a cliff to his death, but the cause of his death was “undetermined,” according to a coroner’s report released Monday.

He’s a football player in excellent physical health. He got really, really drunk. He climbed a large wall and fell over 100′. I don’t see the mystery here. Tragedy? Yes. Mystery? No.

The author of The Progress Paradox, Gregg Easterbrook, writes a weekly column for ESPN.com called Tuesday Morning Quarterback during football season. I didn’t get a chance to read it Tuesday because I was still in Vegas. I love Easterbrook because he’s not afraid to tackle social issues in the middle of discussing the merits of good run-blocking. Buried in the middle of this week’s football news he wrote the following:

Last week the British Medical Journal, a technical publication, released a survey in which physicians said sewers, not antibiotics or vaccines, were the greatest public health advance of the past two centuries. Those who live in the favored cities of the West should never take sanitation for granted. The construction of sewage systems in European and American cities, beginning in the late 19th century, dramatically lowered rates of disease, to say nothing of making cities more livable; lowered disease in turn helped Western nations grow more productive and affluent. Today much of the developing world is held back by the fact that its citizens are often sick, and thus not productive. Open conduits of sewage run down the streets of many large developing-world cities; raw sewage pours directly into the Ganges, where bathers are supposed to go for purification rites. In many developing nations the No. 1 need is clean water: clean drinking water, buried sewer systems and modern wastewater treatment plants. The United States appears to have wasted nearly $1 trillion in Iraq. That sum could have brought modern public sanitation to the 25 largest cities of the developing world, and made America the hero of the world’s poor for generations.

Genarlow Wilson, honor student and football star, had consensual sex with a fellow teenager. What happened to him next was a crime.

When he was a senior in high school, he received oral sex from a 10th grader. He was 17. She was 15. Everyone, including the girl and the prosecution, agreed she initiated the act. But because of an archaic Georgia law, it was a misdemeanor for teenagers less than three years apart to have sexual intercourse, but a felony for the same kids to have oral sex.

Now he’s sitting in prison. He got ten years. Been there for two. And there’s not much anyone can do about it, although some are trying.