The ashes of the cat which appeared in the opening credits of British soap opera Coronation Street for 11 years will be auctioned on Thursday…. The auction listing said Frisky beat off 5,000 other cats in 1990 to win an appearance in the opening credits.”
-Ha ha, cat beats off 5000 cats for walk-on role. TOUGH BUSINESS! In other wacky news punchlines: humans pay money for TV cat’s remains. (Also for Winston Churchill’s golden, lisp-obscuring dentures.)

This seems extremely dangerous: University of Arizona scientists have successfully introduced a gene into mosquitoes that blocks the growth of the malaria parasite. The idea, is then to release the malarial-resistant mosquitoes into the wild, in hopes that they will replace the current strain that infects more than 250 million people a year with the disease, leading to more than a million deaths. “Before we do this, we have to somehow give the mosquitoes a competitive advantage over the disease-carrying insects,” said professor Michael Riehle, a principle investigator on the project, to the BBC. Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! How many time do you have to tell these scientists to watch Deep Blue Sea? (And, you know, they’d probably enjoy it. It’s lots of fun!) It’s not enough that we’re going to introduce genetically modified insects into nature, now we need to make them stronger? Here’s a list of ways we SHOULD NOT give these new mosquitoes a competitive advantage:

1) six-inch mandibles
2) fly-swatter-proof exoskeleton
3) shorter gestation period
4) telekinesis
5) ant strength
6) acid-blood
7) human growth hormone
8) hyperdrive
9) the ability to access people’s minds through their dreams (also known as “inception”)
10) laser shields

In fact, how about just making mosquitoes without stingers? I mean, problem solved, right?

“Last Friday 64-year-old Armand M. Pacher of Aventura was arrested for suspicion of having sex with his female great dane. Pacher’s lawyer says the whole thing is a miscommunication started by a bad joke. It doesn’t help his case any though that the dog was named after super model and sex symbol Christie Brinkley.”
-Not only can you not joke about bombs in airports, you can’t joke about getting it on with your dog at the vet any more. Also: back off, Alaska! What with all the alleged dog-sexing, America’s wang doesn’t even have to try to defend its title of nuttiest state.

by Michael Brendan Dougherty

10) Federal Vision

9) Presuppositional Apology

8) Unconditional Election

7) Infralapsarian reprobation

6) Monergism

5) Post-Redemptionist Amyraldism

4) Penal Substitution

3) Total Depravity

2) Canons of Dort

1) Double Imputation

Michael Brendan Dougherty is interested in a particular redemption, if you want to help him out.

Mmmm, mmmm, mmmm! Soon your meat may come pre-seasoned and help the environment: “Curry spices could hold the key to reducing the enormous greenhouse gas emissions given off by grazing animals such as sheep, cows and goats, scientists have claimed. Research carried out at Newcastle University has found that coriander and turmeric — spices traditionally used to flavour curries — can reduce by up to 40 per cent the amount of methane that is produced by bacteria in a sheep’s stomach and then emitted into the atmosphere when the animal burps.”

Not to get all refudiatory at Sarah Palin, but her nonsense over the weekend concerning the plans for Cordoba House, the Muslim community center to be located in downtown Manhattan got me thinking: Who does hold the emotional blackmail rights to the nearby area where a tragedy occurred nearly nine years ago? A quick perusal of the popular press reveals the following percentages.

American “heartland”: 37% (20% American south, 10% midwest, 7% far west and remaining territories
Glenn Beck and assorted Republican mouthpieces: 22%
New York Post columnist Andrea Peyser: 10% (this number is apparently a reflection of volume rather than actual “moral standing”)
Rudy Giuliani: 6%(I’ve checked these figures several times and they’re solid, but it is still kind of amazing how much territory he’s ceded since his terrible presidential campaign; the guy used to account for a solid quarter of the pie chart)
Victims’ families: 10% (so long as they still call out for vengeance)
Police and firemen: 5%, depending on where we are in the cycle of castigating them for their pensions
Developer Larry Silverstein: 5.05%
George W. Bush: 3.90% (Decision Points is out November 9)
Darryl Worley: 1%
Victims’ families, non vengeance-seeking: 0.03%
Actual New York City residents who were here during the attack, lost friends and acquaintances, saw entire swathes of town blocked off by armed military personnel, and can still remember the acrid stench of charred metal and bone that hovered over the city for days while a terrible uncertainty lingered over the very possibility of existence: 0.02%
Peaceful Muslims: 0.00%

Monster Deep-Space Explosion Breaks X-Ray Specs

“The burst was so bright when it first erupted that our data-analysis software shut down. So many photons were bombarding the detector each second that it just couldn’t count them quickly enough. It was like trying to use a rain gauge and a bucket to measure the flow rate of a tsunami … When I first saw the strange data from this burst, I knew that I had discovered something extraordinary. It was an indescribable feeling when I realized, at that moment, that I was the only person in the whole universe who knew that this extraordinary event had occurred.”
–Phil Evans, a postdoctoral research assistant at the University of Leicester, reports the discovery of the most powerful explosion of deep-space X-rays ever recorded. The blast, detected on June 21st through software Evans helped write for NASA’s Swift Satellite, is thought to have been the result of a star collapsing to form a black hole in a galaxy five billion light years from Earth. Evans’ sense of power and euphoria wore off as soon as he realized that such a discovery would probably still not retroactively make him popular in high school.

TheWaPo’s ‘Secret America’ Project: cheesy name, terrific reporting. http://bit.ly/10RwS Show me the bloggers who could have done this!Mon Jul 19 14:42:14 via web

Kyle Pope
kylepope

The Observer-of which this Twitter tweeter is the editor-is currently hiring! On the web side. For an editor to manage the content produced by the paper’s bloggers and stuff. Annnyhoo! Also you know what else didn’t produce a series like the Washington Post’s Secret America series, which can be viewed as an actual article instead of a really annoying slideshow, if you view the print version? Conde Nast Portfolio! RIP. Our best wishes to everyone in the pursuit of journalistic excellence online and in print.

The new Broken Social Scene video is a pastiche of shocking news footage and ugly still photos that basically amounts to the same “We are Rome before the fall! The world is ending!” gist you’ve seen projected on wall space at too many college art shows. But the editing is so expertly crisp and the song itself so propulsive and engaging that by the end, you find yourself ready to sign up for the revolution. The you’re like wait, what revolution? And then you just hope that huge packs of humboldt squid would come flying out of the oceans and finish us off already. Seriously great song, though.

“When you spend hours making a doll camera-ready, she said, ‘it doesn’t seem funny at all when an extra pretends that the dummy is giving him a blow job.’”
-Every time I see the word blowjob in the New Yorker (or, as they have it, “blow job”) I have a brief pang of sorrow for the ghost of William Shawn. It passes quickly, though, because, you know, blowjobs!