Don’t Feed the Bears

The animal related news just keeps coming.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/europe/08/20/bear.death.reut/index.html?eref=rss_topstories

A man was found naked, dead, and half-eaten in a bear cage at the Belgrade Zoo during the annual beer festival. That sentence alone raises some pretty scary questions. Of course the most obvious, what was the man doing in the bear cage to start with? Followed closely by, what was he doing in the bear cage with no clothes on?

The zoo director speculated that the man might have been drunk or drugged or an idiot. I'm thinking all three sound pretty likely to me. Think about it, there were plenty of other people at the beer festival and surely many of them were drunk, many of them were drugged, and many of them were idiots. Only one of them was found dead and naked in the bear cage.

So, I imagine that this guy had a pretty serious case of beer goggles. He looked over and saw Mama Bear bent over foraging for a snack. He decided to get naked, jump in, and get a little fuzzy loving. He got a little more than he bargained for.

Down Under Thunder

Anyone who’s ever owned a male dog knows all about getting their leg humped by their pet. Imagine if the pet weighed 336lbs, though.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6954728.stm

At that weight, a simple leg humping is more akin to barnyard rape, and it can be quite dangerous. As a matter of fact, an Australian woman was killed by her pet camel when it knocked to the ground and tried to mount her. Previously, the family goat had been nearly suffocated during one the camel’s amorous adventures.

Now what I want to know is, exactly what do you have to look like to be the “object of the male camel’s desire”? Are humps on your back a prerequisite or is it just a bonus? Do you need to bare your teeth anytime you get frustrated? And should you spit huge globs of snot on random passerby?

It just makes you wonder about what else was going on at that farm. Camels, goats, and people. Freaky!

What Would You Come Back As?

The Chinese are everywhere. All of my electronics are made there. Most of my clothes are made there. Many of the people that I've worked with over the years are from there. Many of our cars are made there (and the ones that aren't use parts that are made there anyway). And they house a huge portion of the world's population.

It seems to me that China can do pretty much whatever it sets its mind to. There's really nothing in our modern culture that they don't at least have a hand in. Except death.

Even that is changing, though: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20227400/site/newsweek/

China has now banned Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnating without government permission. You're probably thinking the same thing I was thinking: What?

As I understand it, reincarnation among Buddhists has to do with your life force and karma. The two things combine somehow and determine your reincarnation path. To be pretty simplistic, good people get good reincarnations as better people, bad people might come back as rats or roaches. I don't recall ever hearing about someone having control over reincarnation.

I wonder how this new ruling is going to be enforced, though. Is the government going to come to your private Buddhist school one day and have all the first graders tell who they were in a previous life? Anyone admitting to having been a monk from Tibet is cleared against a list of approved reincarnations. How long do you think it takes before all the kids are just admitting to being reincarnations of Elvis and Marilyn Monroe?

And can they use this rule in other law enforcement situations? Say, for example, a guy gets pulled over for speeding. The police officer checks the driver's information and realizes that this is the third time this week that the driver has been pulled over. "Listen, man, you know the rule. Three strikes, buddy. I've got to report this to the GRUB (Government Reincarnation Usage Board). Driving like this, you'll be lucky to come back as a snail."

Gettin’ Hitched

Most of the country likes to poke fun at Arkansas for a variety of reasons, and many of the jokes that are made have something to do with questionable marriage practices. As a result, the state really can't afford to make mistakes in that area, but they have.

http://www.comcast.net/news/national/index.jsp?cat=DOMESTIC&fn=/2007/08/17/741951.html&cvqh=itn_toddler

Before July 31, 2007, girls could marry at age 16 and boys could marry at age 17 both with parental consent. In trying to move to a more modern outlook on marriage ages, the legislature attempted to create a new law setting the minimum age at 18 across the board. Apparently everyone in the Arkansas legislature was educated in their fine home state, so the law came out reading thus:

"In order for a person who is younger than eighteen (18) years of age and who is not pregnant to obtain a marriage license, the person must provide the county clerk with evidence of parental consent to the marriage."

Did you catch that? Anyone under the age of 18 that is not pregnant can get married with parental consent. Quite effectively, they have created a law that does the exact opposite of what they intended. Basically, anyone can get married in Arkansas.

I imagine that it would be a boon for tourism. All the pedophiles are going to see the state as one big outlet mall for kids, and once they're married every other state will recognize their relationship as valid and legal. And all the kids that think they're old enough to get married are going to flock there in droves with handwritten forgeries of their parent's consent just to try their luck with the county clerk.

Move over Vegas. Arkansas is the new place to be for weddings.

In response to the mistake, a code revision commission tried to correct the mistake, but they couldn't get it done. Unbelievable. How hard is it to remove one word? Most places it's a few taps on the delete key, but I'm not sure they have computers yet. A bottle of whiteout doesn't cost that much, though, does it? Or are these guys still inscribing laws on stone tablets with a hammer and chisel?

My favorite, though, is a quote from one of their Senators, "You're either pregnant or you're not pregnant…Rarely will that be a typographical error."

Does that make sense to anyone else? I'm wondering if every once in a while an Arkansas doctor steps into the waiting room to address the family and says, "Well, folks, it was a good strong labor, and we did all that we could, but in the end we had to admit that it was just a typographical error. Sorry, no grandkids today."

How Wrong Can You Be?

One of the big topics of the upcoming election season is going to be global warming. Almost everyone in the race will say that it is a real phenomenon caused by man, and they will almost all say that they have the right plan for how to handle it. I'm still not convinced that global warming is anything more than a political scare tactic that benefits radical, tree-hugging organization like Greenpeace. Take this article for instance:

http://www.universetoday.com/2007/08/17/arctic-ice-coverage-will-shrink-to-2050-projections-this-summer/

Apparently, some scientists (the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) predicted that the area of the Arctic Sea covered by ice would shrink to about 4.5 million square kilometers by 2050. Now, a different set of scientists (the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) are observing the current coverage area of ice in the Arctic Sea and are forecasting that the coverage area will shrink to 4.5 million square kilometers by mid-September, 2007. I think most people are going to read this and assume the worst. We've screwed up our planet so bad that things are spiraling out of control at an alarming rate, and we might not be able to fix it.

I think that the IPCC, though, gets much closer to the truth. When asked about the predictions, they responded, "The IPCC forecast cannot adequately explain what is now happening in the Arctic Sea." Basically, they're saying, "We don't have a freakin' clue."

Personally, I think that about sums it up. They don't know. The scientists want you to believe that they know. They want you to think that they've got all the data and that they've got all the answers. But the truth is that they are just guessing and then using the data to test and see if their guesses are anywhere close to being correct. All this article proves to me is that not only can we not predict the weather for this weekend, but we can't do any better job of predicting the weather for the next decade.