"A Chinese farmer claims that one of his sheep has given birth to a puppy dog."

Over the weekend a bunch of people hopped on to publicizing Oregon-based science writer (apparently not the proprietor of Very Media of the same name) David Appell's claim that "True/Slant abuses writers." (True/Slant is a centralized web-based writer-place, that engages writers for fairly low fees and sells advertising.) Appell signed up in November, for a fee of $200 a month-but was accidentally only paid $150 for December. He wrote the CEO-who did not respond to him! When other people in the company were alerted, they cut him a check for the remaining $50. But! AND THEN! They terminated their contract with him! "They're a pretty slimy [...]

The marketing team that dreamed up Drake University's latest campaign, "The D+ Advantage," got so carried away by an apparent allusion to positively charged molecules that it thought it could either ignore or, alternately, capitalize on one obvious fact: the logo is the grade for pathetically under-average schoolwork, a D-plus.

Or, as Drake envisions it, "your Potential + our Opportunities."

It's a chemistry equation, see… except with people and a horribly misguided institution of higher learning. (Never mind that a positively charged ion attracts negativity-but hey, I barely passed Rocks For Jocks in college, so I'll leave the scientific interpretation to others.)

Earlier this week, we learned about the fastest and slowest driving days in New York City: "Thursday, Nov. 13 was the slowest weekday of the year studied, with an average speed of 7.5 m.p.h. – about the speed of the typical jogger in Central Park. Excluding federal holidays, the fastest weekday: Monday, Sept. 28, at a speed of 11.7 m.p.h." Turns out that Monday, September 28, 2009 was Yom Kipppur. You know, the day pretty much all Jews are inside? Make of this what you will.