“The recent discovery in Bonny Doon, Calif., of a former mail carrier’s old stash was not exactly unprecedented. There’s also the recent arrest of a Detroit postal carrier who squirreled away 9,000 pieces of mail into a storage locker, a work dodge worthy of a Seinfeld plot. A week earlier, a postman was nailed for hoarding 27,000 letters in Leeds, England; the week before that revealed a postal hoarder with 20,000 letters in Frankfurt, Germany. (“[He] didn’t deliver mail addressed to himself either,” a police statement dryly noted.) And all of them were dwarfed by the North Carolina postman who admitted in August to filling his garage and burying in his backyard nearly a tractor trailer’s worth of undelivered junk mail.”
“A researcher at Pennsylvania State University, Stephan Schuster, said in the journal Nature last week that he might be able to regenerate a mammoth from ancient DNA for just $10 million. Given that Chicago’s Field Museum, with the help of McDonald’s and Walt Disney, recently paid $8.36 million for an especially fine Tyrannosaurus rex fossil, Dr. Schuster should be able to sell a pack of live mammoths to zoo managers around the world.
For making the past come alive, a mammoth is a good start, but it’s just a hairy elephant. What other extinct species would be good to have around again? Herein, a wish list.
A friend (thanks, julia), who herself happens to be a cartoonist, forwarded a link to this site to me and also mentioned she knows the writer of Pharyngula and had sent it his way. (Coincidentally, Pharyngula is on my reading list and I had already seen the blink to the CAC site there.) With Pharyngula having a much larger readership than FmH (or at least a more vocal readership), there have been in excess of a hundred comments to the post over there. Like my take on it, opinion is running in favor of its being a parody. Especially telling is that one reader tracked down the registered owner of the CAC domain and reports that it belongs to an animation studio! In any case, I learned a new, very useful, concept from the comments — Poe’s Law.
…and the end-of-year best-of lists are starting to appear. I won’t even try to point to individual lists because in this weblogging era so many come tumbling out every day. The best aggregators are Largehearted Boy, for music, and Fimoculous, for everything. If you like that sort of thing, bookmark them and check back with them frequently, as they do obsessional running updates from now into early next year.
“The key to a con is not that you trust the conman, but that he shows he trusts you. Conmen ply their trade by appearing fragile or needing help, by seeming vulnerable. Because of THOMAS, the human brain makes us feel good when we help others–this is the basis for attachment to family and friends and cooperation with strangers. “I need your help” is a potent stimulus for action.”
I recently had the displeasure of watching you bash the protestors of the Prop 8 marriage ban to Bill O’Reilly on FOX News. I must say, after years of watching you build your career by stirring up the fears and prejudices of the far right, I feel compelled to use the words of your idol, Ronald Reagan, “There you go, again.”
However, I realize that you may have been a little preoccupied lately with planning your resurrection as the savior of your party, so I thought I would fill you in on a few important developments you might have overlooked…”
