animals

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.

Now that is an awesome headline! As my friend Kelly, who sent me the link, said, “Only in Florida …” This is one hell of a story to read. You can file this one as “Reason #419 Not to Get High on Crack and Fall Asleep Next to a Lake in Central Florida”. I love the line, “It was not clear why Apgar was in the lake.”

“A 45-year-old man was hospitalized after four sheriff’s deputies rescued him from the jaws of a nearly 12-foot alligator Wednesday, while he was naked and high on crack cocaine.”

I can tell you from personal experience that there are few things in life as scary as being confronted with an alligator in the dark. There were probably a half-dozen times while I was in college that I came within three or four feet of a gator while on my morning runs. Crew practice started at five a.m. and Lake Newnan is in the middle of a swamp. I remember one time my crewmates and I had to sit in the boat on the water for a good half hour while we waited for a nasty-looking gator to get bored with sunning himself on our dock …

Despite a growing public revulsion and overwhelming bi-partisan political support, a few members of Congress — notably Texas Republican Congressman Henry Bonilla — have managed to stall federal legislation to outlaw horse slaughter.

This weekend I finally finished Bill Bryson’s “A Short History of Nearly Everything”. It was a terrific read, truly wonderful. Bryson managed to make even the most esoteric, incredibly — for lack of a better word — boring details about life on this planet inconceivably fascinating. I mean really, it takes a brilliant author to get you completely engrossed in plate tectonics, genome theories, and the Brownian motion of subatomic particles. I’m not a very good test subject, actually, because I tend to find these types of things amazing and fun even when presented in incredibly bland tomes on them, but I have to tell you that even if you aren’t even barely interested in glaciers or the lipids that comprise your cell walls, this book will enthrall you.

I also just recently finished “Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers” by Mary Roach. This book, too, was just so damn fun to read. A bit morbid, to be sure, but Roach approaches everything with a bent towards comedy and I enjoyed it.

And lastly I should mention that my girlfriend and I managed to catch March of the Penguins on Friday night. If it doesn’t win an Academy Award — or two or three or four — I will be astonished.

One of the biggest issues apartment dwellers have to face today is Invisible Donkey infestation.
link via 50 cups

Do you think at ornithological conventions the phrase, “He got a feather up his ass about it,” is used often?

PETA Ups Anti-KFC Campaign With Buckets o’ Blood
A label on the bucket says “Just for you, KFC’s suppliers cram thousands of chickens into filthy sheds, sear baby chicks’ beaks off with a hot wire, slam the birds into crates (breaking their wings and legs), slice their throats open and scald them to death while they’re still conscious. Enjoy.”

The buckets are reminiscent of the “Unhappy Meals” PETA began distributing in 2000 as part of a public relations assault against McDonald’s. The boxes, similar to the Happy Meals that McDonald’s serves to children, contained a stuffed doll that looked like Ronald McDonald holding a bloody butcher’s knife.

Does this dog taste funny to you?

If you were sitting there and decided to make a list of things that leave hideous yellow permanent stains on white t-shirts, you probably wouldn’t even think to put cat urine in the top five.

But you’d be wrong.

Oh, boy. Would you be wrong.

There’s nothing in the world quite as much fun as a quartet of singing horses to brighten your Monday morning.

“No one expects to find a giant hippo living in someone’s backyard.”

I wonder if the conversation went like this:

“Are you sure it’s safe to pet him?”

“Of course it is! Look, if it wasn’t safe, could I do this?”

A worker at Swine Genetics said the company hasn’t had any reports of missing semen, and police said no one has reported anything like it missing.

mycathatesyou.com
Shakespearean Insults
I Found a Duck.com