Monday, April 25, 2016

Coffee and Provocation


Bach Wrote a Cantana About Coffee
The Lyrics: "If three times a day I can’t drink my little cup of coffee, then I would become so upset that I would be like dried up piece of roast goat."

More with Less?
Americans used less energy in 2015 than they did in 2014.

Not Just Squirrels Eating Baby Birds
Chas Clifton over at Southern Rockies Nature Blog has a post about prairie dogs eating ground squirrels. As biologist John Hoogland of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science reports: “Prairie dogs will chase ground squirrels—usually babies—and if they catch them, they shake them violently. While they’re shaking, they’re biting the back of the neck to sever the vertebral column. Sometimes they grab by the head and literally debrain the baby. It’s violent, savage, and awful.”

The New $20 Bill
The new $20 bill is a perfect American hash: The freedom-fighting, abolitionist, self-liberating slave Harriet Tubman on the front, and the genocidal slave-owner Andrew Jackson on the back

God Is Not Dead
God is not dead, but he's quickly falling to an epidemic of rationality. The number one religion in the world is now no religion.

Losing Your Head for Shakespeare
A number of theater people have asked that their skulls be removed from their bodies, so they can be used as "Yorick" in Hamlet.

Zika Zika Baby
Residents of a remote part of the Florida Keys will get to vote on whether genetically modified mosquitoes should be released in their neighborhood. The British biotech firm Oxitec has asked to test its modified mosquitoes in a neighborhood of 444 homes clustered on a isolated peninsula north of Key West. The test is of a genetically modified Aedes aegypti mosquito with synthetic DNA whose offspring die or fail to pupate. When GMO mosquitoes meet Zika -- as they will in the Florida Keys and around the world -- will the nonsense fear-mongering about GMO fade?

Winning the War on Malaria
It's still the number one killer, but we're making good progress.  Could GMO mosquitoes help wipe it out?

Thank God They're Legal 
Painkillers now kill more Americans than any illegal drug.

Whoop Whoop Whooper

A wild Whooping Crane has hatched in Louisiana for the first time in 75 years.

Raccoon Will Inherit the Earth?
Nothing larger than a raccoon survived the astroid that hit Earth 66 million years ago.

The Big One Will Hit Oregon, Not California
Hipsters will die in droves.

1 comment:

Megan said...

I get the feeling that the new $20 bill will end up a lot like the Affordable Care Act... an idea that started out with good intentions and a straightforward plan, and then passed through so many cocked-up controversies that it emerged as something rather different.

(Also, for heaven's sake, all controversy aside, Jackson has been on the $20 bill since 1928. He's had a nice run; let someone else have a turn.)