from the better-publicity-through-silicone dept.

Ex-Baywatch actress Tracy Bingham is putting her augmentation on the line to help animals and promote vegetarianism. Specifically, she wore a bikini made of lettuce at a Paris protest yesterday, then attempted to enter a restaurant to inquire about their vegetarian dining options, only to be turned away at the door for her “inappropriate attire.”

from the endtimes-are-upon-us dept.

jonw writes “The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that: A 4-month-old goat with a curious birthmark has fans of the late NASCAR star Dale Earnhardt flocking to a north Florida farm. The brown Nubian goat, named Lil’ Dale, was born with a distinctive white three — Earnhardt’s number — on her right side. "It’s weird," owner Jerry Pierson said. "I’ve seen people take pictures and get tears in their eyes."”

from the badly-spelled-user-submissions dept.
Yeah, I know. Not many lies.com updates lately. Sorry. Working on it. In the meantime, we’ve got another user submission. This one is fairly typical: bad spelling and doesn’t make much sense at all. But it’s something other than nothing, and the “1 Submissions” thing in the Slash admin bar kept staring at me and making me feel guilty. So follow the link, or scroll down, for the submission. Woo!
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from the things-that-go-bloop-in-the-deep dept.

CNN has a story about a super-powerful undersea noise that has scientists baffled. It bears the hallmarks of a biological origin, but matches no known noise pattern, and is extremely loud. Giant squid, maybe, goes one of the guesses.

from the very-scary-fish dept.

Not exactly news, maybe, but news to me. I was reading a cool book about the schizophrenic doctor who helped create the Oxford English Dictionary (The Professor and the Madman, by Simon Winchester), and there’s this wacky digression about the candiru, a South American fish that allegedly will follow a stream of urine through the waters of the Amazon to embed itself, via backward-pointing spines, in your urethra (ouch!). So I’m describing this to my wife, and she starts making fun of me for being such a sap as to believe such an obviously mythical story. So I turn to Google, and low and behold, the story is true. Or at least, true enough to take in the editors of the Encyclopedia Britannica and the normally quite skeptical folks at alt.folklore.urban. The candiru has inspired any number of web sites, including some with detailed descriptions and actual photos of the little monster. And the deeper I dug into the Google links, the wackier it got: there’s candiru poetry, more candiru poetry, and a metal band named after the fish. So what was it, exactly, that we used to do for fun before we had the Web?

from the intra-species-love dept.

So, what are we going to do about Georges, the overly amorous bottlenose dolphin who has been trying to mate with swimmers at the British resort of Weymouth? Ric O’Barry, a dolphin expert whose credentials include a stint as trainer on the Flipper T.V. show, has been brought in to lend his expertise, but to no avail. Personally, I think they need to fly in that guy who runs the dolphinsex.org web site. Let him and Georges go at it for a while, and I’ll bet the dolphin will swear off humans for life.

from the abuse-of-and-by-animals dept.

a_stupid_box writes “Irony of ironies. After the little piece about PETA, I start to find all this animal news. First off is the story about a French rapper fined for spanking his monkey which is a rather short but nontheless funny article. Secondly I find that another fellow Gen-X’er is going to be laid up for a while due to a little disagreement he had with a shark. Important lesson to be learned here, folks, but I’m sure that if you’re on this site you can figure it out on your own.” Hmm. I’ve got no idea what lesson he’s referring to. Don’t spank your monkey, or someone on the other side of the world will be bitten by a great white?

from the one-smear-fits-all dept.

a_stupid_box writes “I came across this story saying how PETA (yes, THAT PETA) is in danger of losing their nonprofit status. Why? Oh, they were just supporting eco-terrorism. PETA donations may no longer be tax-deductible pending a federal investigation. I’m all for treating animals humanely, but if hooking a monkey’s brain up to a car battery is going to let me live 50 years longer, I’ve got two things to say; red is positive, black is negative. PETA seems to value human rights less than animal rights in my honest opinion, so they’re getting no sympathy from me.” It’s actually a pretty interesting article, if slanted fairly heavily in the anti-PETA direction. Worth a read.

from the so,-exactly-what-is-it-that-makes-us-so-special? dept.

Reported today in the journal Science is the story of a band of West African chimpanzees that use stone hammers to open a coconut-like nut. The chimps have apparently been using the tools for up to a century, teaching their offspring to carry on the practice.

from the people-eating-tasty-animals dept.

The annual meeting of the International Whaling Commission has gotten underway in Japan, and the Miami Herald has an interesting article on the early results. IWC meetings have always been a colossal lie-fest, and this year’s is shaping up nicely in that regard, with much of the fun centering on Japan’s (so far failed) efforts to get the organization’s ban on commercial whaling overturned. (Not that that stops anyone from engaging in commercial whaling; it just requires that the offending country claim the killing is for aboriginal subsistence or for scientific research, as is done by Russia and Japan, respectively.) I like Japan’s denial that they are using promises of foreign aid to get poor countries to join the IWC and vote as part of the pro-whaling bloc; the latest countries to jump on that particular bandwagon are Benin, Gabon, Palau and Mongolia, traditionally uninterested nations that have all joined the IWC in the last few months and are voting in lockstep with Japan.

from the nice-kitty.-nice,-BIG-kitty. dept.

A twenty-one-year-old zookeeper had her arm bitten off by a 350-pound male lion at Tampa’s Busch Gardens yesterday, leaving the woman in serious condition, with doctors unsure of whether the severed limb could be reattached. Scary story, with mental visuals conveniently available via my recollection of that gruesome scene in the Nastassja Kinski/Malcom McDowell remake of Cat People.

from the um,-okay dept.

Lucy Spelman, director of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Zoo in Washington, has rejected a reporter’s request for the medical records of a recently deceased giraffe, Ryma, saying that to release the records would violate the dead animal’s right to privacy. Legal experts want to know what she’s been smoking, though it seems likely, given the circumstances, that she’d view that information as private, too.

from the well,-slamms-him dept.

It’s basically just a sad story about someone with poor self-control taking his frustrations out on his pet, but I’m passing on this link for another reason: It’s an object lesson in my own stupidity. See, I saw the headline Fort Lauderdale man jailed in puppy slammming death, and immediately had to follow it to find out what this weird new verb (“slammming”) referred to; obviously it was some new street argot I hadn’t picked up on before this. It didn’t occur to me that a mainstream news site like the Miami Herald’s, with a fancy serifed type treatment on their logo and everything, would let a simple typo like that propagate to the four corners of the Web.

from the cute,-furry…-and-deadly dept.

From Yahoo News comes the story of suicidal squirrels that have taken to leaping out into the path of oncoming cyclists at Stanford University. Students are reportedly suffering mental trauma over the attacks, causing some to question the morality of their own presence on the 8,180-acre campus. “The squirrels were here first, I know, but I need an education, don’t I?” sobbed Katie Founds, distraught after nearly biking over the body of a dead squirrel. Meanwhile, the school’s administration says it will not be intimidated by the rodent onslaught. “We will never give in to terror,” vowed University President John Hennessy.

from the animal-husbandry-(or-maybe-wifery) dept.

My weather-obsessed acquaintance Imagery slid this one my way: Nerve.com’s interview with Dr. Steve Wickler, a Cal Poly prof who teaches courses in collecting semen from bulls. It’s a big, freaky world out there, people.

from the would-you-like-blubber-with-that? dept.

Japan is reportedly pushing hard for a resumption of commercial whaling at the just-opened annual conference of the International Whaling Commission. This would allow an expansion of Japan’s “harvesting” of whales beyond the 400 to 500 they currently kill each year for “scientific research” purposes. Japan’s IWC representatives claim that whales are becoming so numerous that they pose a threat to the world’s fish populations. I was going to invent an absurd quotation on that, but then decided there wouldn’t be any point. The whole thing is thoroughly depressing, anyway.

versicherungsvergleich und private krankenversicherung

from the I-(heart)-google dept.

Yet another use for everyone’s favorite search engine: asking (and receiving expert answers to) obscure questions about animals. Like, at what height will a cat NOT land on its feet?. My favorite part of this answer is the bit about the rumored “buttered-toast-cat antigravity device”: “Buttered toast always lands buttered side down; cats always land feet first; tie a piece of buttered toast onto the back of a cat and it can never hit the floor!”

from the ants-go-marching-one-by-one-hurrah dept.

CNN is one of several outlets carrying an AP story about a supercolony of Argentine ants that stretches for 3,600 miles along the European coastline from the Italian Riviera to northwest Spain. The ants, which were accidentally introduced to Europe in the 1920s, cooperate with neighboring colonies, rather than competing with them.

from the ashes-to-ashes,-kitty-litter-to-kitty-litter dept.

CNN is running this story of the explosive growth in the “pet-death industry”. Among the things mentioned are the rise in pet cemeteries, pet sympathy cards, and support groups for grieving pet-death survivors. “Yet even as the options for mourning a pet multiply, many owners still fear their grief might be mocked or misunderstood,” the article says. Oops. Look, for the record, I’m not the sort of choom who would mock somebody for their grief. Death is death, sorrow is sorrow, and people who can find it in their hearts to love and mourn for other living creatures, be they ape-descended tool-using hominids or otherwise, are okay in my book. Shame on me.