From the BBC: Iranian woman ‘gives birth to frog’.

An Iranian newspaper has reported the controversial story of a woman who claims to have given birth to a frog.

The Iranian daily Etemaad says the creature is believed to have grown from larva to an adult frog inside her body.

While it is unclear how this could have happened, the paper carries quotes from medical experts who say there are human characteristics to the animal.

It has been speculated that the woman, who has not been named, unknowingly picked up the larva while she was swimming in a dirty pool.

Link courtesy of Patrons of the Absurd.

From Bravo, provider of the best links in the known universe: The infinite cat project.

David Neiwart of Orcinus has a lengthy but very interesting-to-me discussion about the orca Tokitae (or Lolita, if you prefer her stage name): Freeing Lolita.

Everybody knows how gross it can be when a whale blows up. But imagine how bad it would be be if it happened all over your car. Actually, don’t bother imagining — this is why you shouldn’t drive 60-tons of decomposing flesh through the center of town.

One of my favorite books as a young boy was Vinson Brown’s How to Understand Animal Talk. With a little imagination and patience, learning to communicate with another species really isn’t all that hard.

Here’s an example of that sort of communication going in the opposite direction: Parrot’s oratory stuns scientists. The stuff about telepathy, and the generally breathless nature of the story, make me worry that what we’ve really got here is the Brit equivalent of the Weekly World News, but still, it’s fun.

If you’re a fan of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog from Conan, or of Terry Gross, or (especially) both, you definitely owe it to yourself to check out the latter’s interview of the former from today’s show: Fresh Air. It’s great… for me to poop on!

Apparently bark translation is the next big thing in Japan. The next logical evolution of this technology is text messaging from your pooch. How exciting, as you sit in you cube and recieve “I have to pee.” messages from man’s best friend.

(As seen in the Drudge Report) Aparently, a very sweet old lady with a lot cats died a few years ago, and since then her son has come by every few months with some large bags of cat food and just let the 103 cats have the run of the place … Felines rove in walls as bugs root through filth, building condemned — I really can’t even imagine what kind of person could just walk through feces 3 feet deep to dump some cat food in a kitchen sink.
My favorite quote: “Once the cats breed inside the walls, its economically impossible to clean it up, You can imagine what’s inside those walls, and what the house is going to smell like forever.”
My friend’s favorite quote: “He’s also brought out one dog, a beagle. Jacobson said the dog looked well-fed.”

Could there be a more apt allegory? From CNN: US soldier kills Baghdad tiger. There’s also this piece from the AP: US soldier shoots tiger at Baghdad zoo. From the latter:

BAGHDAD, Iraq – A U.S. soldier shot and killed a tiger at the Baghdad zoo after it bit another soldier who had reached through the bars of its cage to feed it, a zoo security guard said Saturday.

The soldiers had been drinking beer when they entered the zoo Thursday night after it closed, said the guard, Zuhair Abdul-Majeed.

“He was drunk,” Abdul-Majeed said of the bitten soldier.

After the man was bit, the other American shot the tiger three times in the head and killed it, Abdul-Majeed told The Associated Press.

Judgement clouded by the effects of alcohol, acting on the basis of a macho impulse without bothering to consider the risk, a soldier decides it would be fun to demonstrate his sense of power and ownership over a predatory beast by feeding it some scraps of meat. The animal is dangerous, to be sure, but it is confined in a cage, and the soldier is armed with the latest high-tech weaponry. It will be fun. And besides, it will demonstrate the soldier’s humanitarian side. He’s helping the animal, see?

Ignoring all warnings, he places himself in close proximity to the tiger, and discovers too late that telescopic sights and laser-guided bombs aren’t a guarantee of safety when you are within arm’s length of razor-sharp claws guided by a hostile will. He falls, wounded, and his companion, in a fit of retribution, kills the still-caged beast with three bullets to the head.

Obviously, the soldier is George Bush (or the USA, more generally); the tiger is Saddam Hussein (or Iraq). Both parties come away from the experience having paid a price, the tiger somewhat moreso. And while the soldier would doubtless blame the tiger for the debacle, a more sober observer might view things differently.

Here’s one of those things that you come across during random surfing (apologies for having lost track of where I came across the link) that just makes you lean back in your chair and say, “whoa.” Anyway: HumanDescent’s page at b3ta.com. Update: Oh; the real site of the user in question, with even more wackiness, is here: HumanDescent.

Yet another Gwynne Dyer column I came across this morning, this one on the subject of recent efforts to expand the legal definition of “human” to include closely related species, like chimpanzees: We should grant ‘human rights’ to our closest living relatives.

From AP, via Janus, comes word of this nifty experiment/performance art: Typing monkeys don’t write Shakespeare. And though it may make no sense to you whatsoever, I really liked Lucy’s comment when Janus mentioned the URL (which included the string ‘britain_monkey_authors’) in the mud: “Even without looking at that article I want it to be about Tommy.” See, it’s funny because Tommy is me in the mud, and I wrote this book with a monkey on the cover and… Oh, never mind. You had to be there.

People keep submitting this story, and I guess it does seem like the sort of thing I would run, even though I chose to pass over it initially. Anyway, by popular demand, here you go: Takoma the dolphin is AWOL. Reader immy2g also helpfully supplied a link to the earlier story: U.S. enlists dolphins to aid war effort.

These are the days of miracles and wonders. What else to conclude after reading the story of the talking carp that began shouting dire predictions – in Hebrew – about the coming end of the world . My favorite part is how the shocked fishsellers who heard the fish went on to butcher and sell it.

From Hiro comes word of masskilling.com, where the good folks at PETA compare the plight of animals on factory farms to Jews in WWII-era concentration camps. Needless to say, this has certain folks in an uproar.

From a_stupid_box comes this link: Children Terrified As Python Eats Boy. Nasty stuff.

Michael Pollan has a cool piece in the latest New York Times Magazine, called An Animal’s Place (stupid mandatory login required, cypherpunk98/cypherpunk works for now). In it he talks about factory farming, the animal rights movement, and the various ways in which one can try to combine meat-eating with a moral existence in early twenty-first century America. Cool followup reading I stumbled upon while Googling for the author’s name includes Power Steer, an earlier NYT Magazine piece where the author follows the life of a particular bovine, and factoryfarm.org, where you can arm yourself to take on the CAFOs of the world (that’s “Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation”). Bon appetit.

Adding still more weight to the argument that our culture’s obsession with gun violence is causing a self-perpetuating cycle, an otherwise-normal year-old English setter shot his owner last Saturday. When will the madness end?

A day after squeaking back into official membership at the International Whaling Commission, Iceland has announced that it will resume whaling. Fisheries Minister Arni Mathiesen was quoted as saying, “We will only whale in accordance with solid scientific information, and to ensure sustainable development in the oceans surrounding us,” which I was going to doctor up into something more ludicrous-sounding, until I realized his original statement was already there.

from the I-could-while-away-the-hours dept.

From CNN comes the story of a crow that makes tools, specifically, bending a piece of wire into a hook in order to reach a small bucket of food. Okay; fine. Maybe she can make a tool. Let’s see her make an H-bomb, and threaten the entire biome with instant annihilation. That’s one area of intelligence where good ol’ Homo sapiens is still #1, thank you very much.