If you could go without sleep, would you? And if you did, what would you do with the time?
SciGuy asks that question, with science to back it up. Comment over there.
Category: News
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Feral Cats Cleaning up LA
There is a program in Los Angeles to introduce groups of feral cats into locations with rodent problems. It’s working. Recently, the Los Angeles Police Department has installed their ratting squad into the parking lot of their southeast division.
This is a project of Working Cats.
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Suspect Kills Police Dog
A man, being pursued by police, is taken down by a police dog. Then he lifts the dog bodily and leaps off a bridge. He is injured, the dog is dead.
Should this man be charged with killing a police officer?
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Wool-less Sheep
According to a story I read this morning, the cost of shearing sheep is going up while the price of wool is going down. Therefore, more and more sheep farmers are going to woolless sheep in order to avoid the expensive shear every year.
I hazard three conclusions from this article:
- Sheep are being grown more for meat than for wool, nowadays?
- Shearing is a requirement every year for wooly sheep?
- There’s a breed of sheep without wool? Weird.
If #2 is true, how did sheep ever survive in the wild? Why can’t the farmers just not shear their sheep every year? This begs for further investigation.
As a last note, I don’t believe that I would have picked the word “woolless” if given the option. It’s a mouthful. I would have gone with “woolfree” because, though it might sound funny, it’s catchy.
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Lottery = Tax?
A friend of mine jokes that state and multi-state lotteries are taxes on people who are bad at math. Given the odds of winning, he’s right, if you plan to use the lottery as a retirement vehicle. However, I will occasionally buy a quick-pick lottery ticket, when the prize gets up there in zeroes, because “Hey, You never know.” It’s fun to have the ticket in your wallet and think about what you might do with the winnings.
Then there are people who spend untold amounts on lottery scratch off’s, yet occasionally hit it big. Like Phillip Young, who recently won $1,000,000 on a scratch off ticket. I’m very happy for him, but what appalled me about the story was what the store clerk had to say.
Steve Rahman, manager of the Citgo, said Young stops by the convenience store several times a week and buys $30 to $40 in lottery tickets during each visit.
Even if we assume that the manager exaggerated Mr. Young purchases by double, that’s still $50 a week minimum in scratch offs. If you invested that at a conservative 7%, you’d have your million dollars in about 45 years! That kind of spending on lotteries is what gives them a bad name amongst the regressive tax people. Given my assumptions, plus 10 years of spending on scratchoffs, Mr. Young has lost $38,500.
So, good for Mr. Young, but I hope he develops some better spending habits.
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Goddidit!
On the AP Wire today was a story about a man who was shot while being robbed. Instead of being mortally wounded, he threw up his hand and the bullet impacted his wedding band. The ring took enough kinetic energy off of the bullet so that it only lodged in the front part of his neck muscles, rather than traversing the various important structures found in the human neck. His wife gives all of the credit to God.
I hope she gives all the credit to God the next time something weirdly bad happens to her. I’ll give all the credit to blind luck, and a 14 karat wedding band.
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The Golden Compass = Antichristian?
Phillip Pullman’s books and the movie based upon the first one, The Golden Compass, have been receiving a lot of hate-press recently due to their perceived anti-christian outlook. The gist is, “Pullman is an atheist [true], who is trying to turn our kids to the devil [only true from a certain perspective].”
I could discuss the pros and cons of these viewpoints, but I’d rather do an end-run. Question: Why didn’t these people come out of the woodwork for Battlestar Galactica? There’s a show where the good guys are polytheistic and the bad guys, bent on the destruction of the human race, are doing it because their sole God (obviously based on the Bible) is telling them to. BSG is much more blatant about it then Pullman ever is. Or what about The Lord of the Rings? Despite Peter Jackson’s pandering to the religious writers on his team, there is NO GOD in the Lord of the Rings. Nobody complained about that. And what about every horror/demon/antichrist film out there? Why do none of them get this sort of treatment?
I think the truth is that the religious don’t think they’ll be able to sell their religions in the face of competing viewpoints. Also, given the control that christians have over this nation, they only fear what is perceived as anti-christian messages. No worries about the push to make “Jihad” a bad word (even though its actual definition doesn’t mean “kill everyone in God’s name”). Notice no complaints about all of the anti-muslim press that bandies about.
The hypocrisy of some people just boggles my feet sometimes. I wish I could blame the media, but their motiviations are strictly monetary; they go where the stories are.
In the interest of full disclosure, I think I should mention that I did not like The Golden Compass, but I’ll still see the film adaptation.
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Bad Luck
Here’s something to go on the “List of Things That Suck.”
A man was (accidentally, freakishly) killed one day before being released from jail.
There must have been some serious karmic load on that guy.
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Ship Signals for Help from a Junkyard
A mayday was received from a ship distress beacon that was residing under a pile of refrigerators. Apparently, the people receiving the signal were on the ball and realized that it was coming from dry land. No helicopters were dispatched. Still, this is entertaining.
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Police Shut down I-75
Yesterday, Jenn was caught in a traffic jam caused by the Police shutting down I-75 soutbound to look for a bank robber.
Apparently, the bank that was robbed slipped a tracking device into the money that was stolen, allowing the police to locate the perpetrator’s position on I-75. Unfortunately, despite the heartache and congestion caused by this rush-hour event, the robber was not apprehended.
Look for deeper thoughts concerning this and other events soon on Talking Traffic.