The Oyster’s Garter

Actually, the giant ground sloth could easily take Josephoartigasia monesi, but the newly discovered, though extinct, species could still feel pride in owning the title of World’s Largest Rodent Ever. Uruguayan Scientists discovered only the skull of this beasty along their national coast, but the fossil measures 53 cm in length (1.5 feet for you non-metric heathens). The scientists say that if you extrapolate a body appropriate for a rodent with a head of that size, the full animal weighed a metric ton (dwarfed by the sloth’s 4.5 metric ton bulk). So, I guess Westley was wrong. R.O.U.S.’s don’t exist, but they sure used to.

This company is concerned that geeks can’t see their laptop screens because when we sit by our pools, the sun is overly bright. Silly company. Everyone knows that geeks never go out in the sun. It might melt our D&D figurines. Anyway, this photo was too wonderful not to post.

I would read way more comics if they weren’t so expensive. (I miss you and your book collection, Martini-Corona…) But here’s a little something to ease the pain - 17 free, downloadable graphic novels. The collection includes some of my personal favorites:  Fables, Sandman, and Y: The Last Man. Enjoy your high-quality procrastination.

This is the most awesome decor ever. A knit dissected frog, neatly mounted? SO AWESOME. (I just wish it were a wee big more anatomically correct. But I am picky like that.)

This reminds me of the Unfortunate Animal of the Month Club. When I have disposable income again, I shall not skimp on Unfortunate Animal Skin Rugs and Headflops and Skull-Headed Animals.

I fear that I will be light on content this month, since I have four grant proposals to get out, as well as a full load of classes. Eeep. In the meantime, please enjoy this example of plagiarism. Apparently a romance novelist copied her dialogue straight from a nonfiction article on black-footed ferrets. And then got caught. Ooops.

A sample:

Shadow Bear responds: “What I have observed of them, myself, is that these tiny animals breed in early spring when the males roam the night in search of females.” As the ferrets bound off into some distant bushes, he continues: “Mothers typically give birth to three kits in early summer and raise their young alone in abandoned prairie dog burrows.”

Shiona: “I read that ferrets stalk and kill prairie dogs during the night. Using their keen sense of smell and whiskers to guide them through pitch-black burrows, ferrets suffocate the sleeping prey, an impressive feat considering the two species are about the same weight.” Shiona shivers, upset by the thought of the cute animals locked in mortal combat.

Sensing her vulnerability, Shadow Bear knows just what to say: “In turn, coyotes, badgers, and owls prey on ferrets, whose life span in the wild is often less than two winters … They have a short, quick life.”

Our most glorious and magnificent national symbol, the bald eagle, seems to be reflecting America’s moral path. National Geographic reports that 19 bald eagles died after they dived into fish waste outside of a processing plant. While gorging themselves on rotting guts, the eagles became so covered in slime that they got hypothermia.

The best line? “Survivors were washed with dish soap.” Now if only we could restore habeus corpus with a little detergent and some elbow grease…

Update:
This makes the logo for the San Diego Minutemen SO MUCH BETTER. (via Tijuana Tales).

Like South Africa, Ireland, Taiwan, and Bangladesh, China has banned free plastic shopping bags. The flimsiest bags are banned outright, while merchants will be required to charge extra for the more study type. Go China!

Screw that scene in American Beauty - plastic bags are ugly litter, clog storm drains, and blow into waterways. At sea, 90% of the trash I see is plastic bags. They never biodegrade, strangle sea life (particularly endangered sea turtle that mistake them for jellyfish) and are a navigational hazard (picking shreds of bag out of the propellor is Not Fun).

Australia may be next to implement a plastic bag ban. Will the US be an environmental luddite on yet another issue? Probably, but write your elected representatives anyway!

Special bonus! Sing along with the Australian minister of the environment as he rocks out with Midnight Oil. I *heart* Peter Garrett.

Imagine a future where you can just throw old plastic containers and punctured tires into a microwave and turn them into oil. Sounds insane, of course, and we should all be damn skeptical of this, but this guy Frank Pringle says that’s exactly what he can do. The theory is that every molecule – including the hydrocarbons that go into petroleum - has a resonant frequency. Kitchen microwaves, for example, are set to make water molecules vibrate. By adjusting the frequency of his microwave and creating a near-vacuum environment, Pringle can convert say, a tire, into 1.2 gallons of oil, 2 pounds of natural gas, and 2 pounds of steel. He’s formed a company around his new invention, Global Resource Corp., and he’s working with an Illinois company to build the first commercial version of his device, for an automotive recycling company in Long Island, NY.

My skeptic’s antennae are quivering on this one, but Pringle has been written up in Popular Science and The Philadelphia Inquirer, and apparently the Department of Energy is starting to look into his process. If it works – if the process isn’t massively polluting, or have some other unintended consequence – then he may have the ultimate two-birds-one-stone process, converting our waste back into its component parts. This won’t actually solve the impending global warming disaster, but who could object to this form of recycling? At least we can stop the expansion of the North Pacific Trash Gyre.

When a mommy and a daddy love each other very much, the daddy wants to give the mommy a special gift - a Windows Home Server. Oh, yes. Microsoft marketing, in an attempt to distract from Vista’s vicissitudes, is distributing “Mommy, Why is There a Server in the House? Helping Your Child Understand the Stay-At-Home Server.” Read this book. Then try to imagine what would happen if an actual child read this book. Then try to imagine what controlled substances brought this particular marketing campaign from the Moria-like depths in which it spawned to the light of day.

Then make sure that all YOUR special gifts run Linux.

Via Chaos Theory

Full props to JeByrnes, who linked to this video in his comment on “Poop Fuel!”. It was too funny not to get its very own post.