Hyperbole for 1000, Alex

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…from American Digest.

That’s some strong cheese.

(HT: Redeye)

What Distracts Drivers?

This is pretty amazing.  It just keeps building and building.

(HT:  Maggie’s Farm)

KingDavid should appreciate this bit of animal control coolness:

That's one ugly bugger. Let's feed him to the ants...

Australian study uses cat food in war on cane toad
Forget cricket bats, golf clubs and carbon dioxide. Australia has found a new weapon in its war on the dreaded cane toad: cat food.

Researchers with the University of Sydney found that a few tablespoons of cat food left next to ponds in the Northern Territory attracts fierce Australian meat ants, which then attack baby cane toads as they emerge from the water. The results of the study were published in the British Ecological Society’s Journal of Applied Ecology this week.

It is the latest weapon in Australia’s seemingly endless battle against the cane toad, which was introduced from Hawaii in 1935 in an unsuccessful attempt to control beetles on sugarcane plantations. The toads bred rapidly, and their millions-strong population now threatens many species across Australia.

Early cane toad killing methods included whacking the creatures with golf clubs or cricket bats. In recent years, most groups dedicated to fighting the pests have turned to freezing or gassing them with carbon dioxide. Still, the toads’ population continues to explode.

Cane toads emit a poison that attacks the heart of would-be predators. But the University of Sydney researchers found that meat ants are impervious to the toads’ poison, said Rick Shine, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Sydney who supervised the research.

“A single toad can have 30,000 eggs in a clutch, so there’s a heck of a lot of tadpoles turning into toads along the edge of a billabong,” he said. “You can literally have tens of thousands of toads emerging at pretty much the same time. They are vulnerable to meat ants if the colony discovers there is a source of free food.”

Between July and September 2008, researchers studied tens of thousands of cane toads emerging from cat food-lined ponds and found that 98 percent of them were attacked by meat ants within two minutes. Of the toads that escaped, 80 percent died within a day from ant-inflicted injuries.

Meat ants?  I think they can keep those down under.

(HT: SynthStuff)

Mental Calculation by N. P. Bogdanov-Belsky

From Dark Roasted Blend:  N. P. Bogdanov-Belsky painted this in 1895.  Can you solve the problem presented to the students of this old Russian village school?  Here it is:

No calculators!  Gotta do it in your head.

City Barred from Removing Graves Near O’Hare

A state appellate court granted a temporary restraining order Thursday night, stopping the City of Chicago from relocating any more graves from the historic cemetery that borders O’Hare International Airport.

“We said there are some very important constitutional issues that involved religious rights that the circuit court had refused to hear,” attorney Joseph Karaganis said of the motion-to-stay filed February 10, reports the Daily Herald. “It would make no sense if the cemetery was gone by the time the appellate court heard these issues.”

The City had removed approximately 20 graves so far to make way for a new airport runway. The court order, however, bars any further disinterment even if the city has already received permission from next of kin.

Well, duh.  Who wants to go to the trouble of re-registering all those voters in a new district?

Compare this:

Too little, too late

A girl fighting for her life after a car she was travelling in plunged into an ice-cold river was not rescued for almost two hours because health and safety rules prevented police from entering the water.  [She subsequently died.]

The five-year-old girl, her-six year-old brother and their father Chris Grady were in the car when it plunged into the river Avon in Evesham, Worcestershire [UK], on Thursday morning.  Mr Grady and his son Ryan, managed to escape from the submerged car. They were helped clear by police officers on the riverbank.

However, Mr Grady’s daughter, Gabrielle, was trapped inside the vehicle for 97 minutes before the closest police dive team, based in the next county, could arrive. The divers then took a further 12 minutes to rescue her.  The officers already on the scene were prevented from diving in earlier to rescue her by police safety regulations.

…with this:

Joe Bag-o-Donuts to the rescue

A quick-thinking glass worker who happened to be driving by when a pilot with a grudge smashed his plane into a Texas building is being hailed as a hero after helping many people escape the inferno that followed the crash.Robin Dehaven, a glazer at Binswanger Glass, was on his way to a job site when he saw the small plane approaching the seven-story building that houses the Internal Revenue Service offices in Austin.

“I immediately drove my truck over there, got the ladder off, went up to the side of the building and I saw people up on the second floor with their heads out the window for air because the room was filled with smoke,” Dehaven said.  “I climbed inside the broken-out window into the building with them,” said Dehaven, who has a 3-year-old son.  “My ladder slipped a little bit actually,” he added.

With the help of one of the men inside, he then broke another window near a ledge, and secured the ladder there so he could get five people out safely.

“I held onto their waists and their backs so they wouldn’t fall if they slipped,” he said.

Where are the Robin Dehavens in England?  I love the Brits, but this is just beyond the pale.

From FoxNews:

The U.S. Army is investigating allegations that soldiers were attempting to poison the food supply at Fort Jackson in South Carolina.

The ongoing probe began two months ago, Chris Grey, a spokesman for the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division, told Fox News.

The Army is taking the allegations “extremely seriously,” Grey said, but so far, “there is no credible information to support the allegations.”

Five suspects, detained in December, were part of an Arabic translation program called “09 Lima” and use Arabic as their first language, two sources told Fox News. Another military source said they were Muslim. It wasn’t clear whether they were still being held.

Grey would not confirm or deny the sources’ information.

I’m guessing this wasn’t a plot by disgruntled Lutherans.  Catholics?  Presbyterians maybe?  Muslims??  No way!

At last, some common sense on this global warming nonsense.  The state of Arizona has finally realized that global warming is a fraud, with real and unaffordable costs and no tangible benefits.

Not since King Canute have government officials engaged in an exercise as futile as in 2007, when seven U.S. states and four Canadian provinces got together to form something called the Western Regional Climate Action Initiative to reduce regional greenhouse gas emissions starting in 2012.

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, seeing which way the snow is blowing, has issued an executive order saying her state will suspend its participation in the emission-control plan or any program that could raise costs for businesses and consumers.

Arizona joined the climate initiative under its previous governor, Janet Napolitano, now secretary of homeland security in the Obama administration.

All 50 states agreed to the cap-and-trade pact, but left implementation up to each state. Only California is ready to start its program in 2012.

Brewer also ordered Arizona’s Environmental Quality Department to take another look at stricter vehicle emission rules, based on California’s standards, set to take effect in 2012, fearing they would significantly raise new car costs. Slowly but surely, economic reality is trumping climate fantasy.

For the academically challenged, King Canute allegedly thought so much of himself that he commanded the tides not to rise.  He failed.

(HT: American Digest)