A: Seriously, guys, I've had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane. Am I right? Anyone? Is this thing on?
CAIRO — A Saudi passenger tried to smuggle a large number of reptiles, including cobra snakes and infant Nile crocodiles, out of Egypt in his luggage, Egypt's official Middle East News Agency reported Sunday.The crime was committed by a Saudi, but a few months, George W. Bush will blame it all on Iraqis.
A: Leave Your answer in the comments. Thanks.
Oh, try to keep the parables to a minimum.
A: No, especially me and my monkey.
And speaking of people with monkeys on their heads, heeeeeeeere's Johnny.
A: Everyone thinks their cat is smarter than everyone else's cat. But they're usually wrong. For instance, I had my cat, Jũniper, file my income tax returns, and now I'm under investigation by the IRS for trying to claim 30 kilos of nip as a business expense.
The only time a cat is actually as smart as you think it is is when it's possessed by Satan. Which is only like 10% of the time. Take Oscar, of Providence, RI's Steere House Nursing & Rehabilitation Center — please!
When Oscar the Cat visits residents of the Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Providence, Rhode Island, the staff jumps into action -- Oscar can sense within hours when someone is about to die.
Raised at the nursing home since he was a kitten, Oscar often checks in on residents, but when he curls up for a visit, physicians and nursing home staff know it's time to call the family.
I wonder how those calls go.NURSE: Hello, Mr. Johnson? We have some bad news about your father.Dr. Joan Teno, whose colleague at Brown
MR. JOHNSON: He's sexually harassing the staff again?
NURSE: No. Well, yes. But also the cat says he's going to die.
MR. JOHNSON: Oh God no. NO. WHY OSCAR WHY!?
NURSE: I'm very sorry to have to be the one to tell you what the cat says. Anyway, we might as well turn off his oxygen machine now.
MR. JOHNSON: THAT DARNED CAT!
"I don't think this is a psychic cat," said Teno. "I think there's probably a biochemical explanation," she said in a telephone interview.That is such a chief of small animal medicine at the University of Illinois College of Veterinary Medicine thing to say.
While pets are often used to bring comfort to the elderly in nursing home settings, Oscar's talent is special, though not unexpected.
"That is such a cat thing to do," said Thomas Graves, a feline expert and chief of small animal medicine at the University of Illinois College of Veterinary Medicine.
A: I finally saw Children of Men
If you haven't seen it, see it. All you need to know about it is nothing. Just SEE IT.
Anyway, immediately following the film, my friend Oo. recommended "Battle of Kruger" on YouTube, and it too BLEW MY MIND. Maybe everyone's already been there done that with this vid (six million+ hits in the past couple months), but if you haven't, SEE IT. Like now:
All you need to know is that it's "A battle between a pride of lions, a herd of buffalo, and two crocodiles at a watering hole in South Africa's Kruger National Park while on safari."
It is imperative that you watch the whole thing. Trust me.
RELATED: The Greatest Long Tracking Shots in Cinema [via Radosh]
Oh, by the by, I'm back. Hi.
A: I can't believe I watched the whole thing — but you have to admit, this is mighty impressive.
Posted on the Daily Dish as Sunday's YouTube of the Day, this dancing Danish horse (for the record, it's Andreas Helgstrand's blue hors matine WEG2006 Freestyle Dressage Final performance, not that I have any fricking clue what that means) is possibly the most fantastically Andrew Sullivanesque clip of all time. I can barely count all the Sullivanisms!
I am convinced that there are genuine and valid levels of perception available with cannabis (and probably with other drugs) which are, through the defects of our society and our educational system, un-available to us without such drugs.LEGALIZE IT, BIOTECHS!
A: Approximately 99.99999% of this site's daily traffic can be traced back to very confused people and their ill-fated searches for pornography. After extensive scientific research, 
Hot chair-on-chair action.I've discovered the reason for this to be that The Answer May Surprise You is a Web site on the Internet.
I do check in on my SiteMeter now and then, just because I like to keep apprised of exactly what sorts of porn my readers are disappointed not to find. The prurient Google searches that erroneously lead to T.A.M.S.Y. commonly involve some combination of acts involving Alice the Snorg Tees model, Anne Hathaway, Lily Allen's 100% natural breasts, gay cowboys and/or Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Every now and then, someone out there discovers a new and unique path to not finding porn here — a search string so dimwittedly arousing, it can only lead to T.A.M.S.Y.
On that note, I'm pleased to announce that I've just uncovered what is surely the most adorably doomed porn hunt in the history of sexually explicit imagery. When it comes to bad Internet porn searches (as it so often does), this reader in New Delhi really takes the cake:
Did I say "takes the cake"? I'd like to amend that to "burns down the Cheesecake Factory." Somewhere in India, a bewildered adolescent is desperately in need of a serious talk. Or a copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves
A: You longtime Chicagoans will apparently find this old ad charming and familiar, rather than hideous and disturbing.
Via Boing Boing.
A: A couple days ago, a commenter on The Comics Curmudgeon brought to my attention The Garfield Randomizer. Based on the theory that "Garfield comics make just as much sense if you throw random panels together," the Randomizer mashes up old strips into an endless cavalcade of new ones. Like, for instance:
Good times. Anyway, after a little while randomizing, a comic appeared that struck me as particularly appropriate for the times — given that my brother, Dimitri, hits the quarter century mark today:
Happy birthday, bro!
We tried to call you, but I assume you're still drunk or whatever. (And to the approximately 300 other people I know whose birthday is today or tomorrow, consider this a birthday card to you, too. I hope you're 25.)
A: Hey, sorry for the recent lack of Surprising Answers®. I've been focusing my attentions on the aforementioned plans to move somewhere not miserably cold. More on that soon.
In the meantime, here's some stuff to read:
Australian diver says partly swallowed by shark [Reuters]
A: No, Reuters just hired Borat as a copy editor. They simply adore his coverage of the Jews.
A: Given that some of my readers aren't hipster scumbags, there's at least a chance you may have passed through 2006 without having heard Ratatat's excellent electro single "Wildcat."
Plus, you West Coasters are the only people left online right now, and lord only knows what you goddamned hippies listen to.
So just in case you missed it, here's the greatest dance instrumental of '06.
Meanwhile, the Ohio two-faced kitten has disappeared. It had a scheduled appointment with a veterinarian on July 15, but the family could not find the kitten that morning. A house door was found open, leading to speculation that it had been stolen or died in the night and was removed by its mother.
A: The Smithsonian ran a cool story in its November issue, "Speaking Bonobo," about the language comprehension skills of Kanzi, a bonobo ape at Des Moines, Iowa's Great Ape Trust. According to Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, the psychologist who trained him, Kanzi can understand 3,000 spoken English words (including 348 he can identify on a special symbol-based keyboard).
Kanzi pushes the button for "Consciousness is a curse"
, about the real-life story of Koko the gorilla, whose trainers taught her remedial sign language. Koko signed "cat" repeatedly to ask for a kitten for her birthday, and then signs assorted :( words after (SPOILER ALERT!!!!!) her kitten is mowed down by a car.She and her colleagues have been testing the bonobos' ability to express their thoughts vocally, rather than by pushing buttons. In one experiment she described to me, she placed Kanzi and Panbanisha, his sister, in separate rooms where they could hear but not see each other. Through lexigrams, Savage-Rumbaugh explained to Kanzi that he would be given yogurt. He was then asked to communicate this information to Panbanisha. "Kanzi vocalized, then Panbanisha vocalized in return and selected 'yogurt' on the keyboard in front of her," Savage-Rumbaugh tells me.In other words, not only can Kanzi "understand" (or at least recognize) the word "yogurt," he can also communicate "yogurt" in ape-speak! Totally awesome. (I mean, assuming this isn't a scam or whatever; I'm curious as to what other experiments the psychologists have run, and whether or not they've been successful.)
Bonobos: 'WE FUCKIN' LOVE YOGURT!!!'
A: Haha, just kidding! Emotionally crippled hippies don't care about sports. They're trying to reject their fathers, not bond with them, duh.
But in a fantasyworld where PETA members did buy NBA season tickets, they almost certainly would be cancelling them now that commish David Stern is doing an uncharacteristic 180 and returning to leather balls, reports ESPN.com's Marc Stein:
It might be the most stunning ball reversal in hoops history.
Not even three months into the life of its controversial synthetic basketball, NBA commissioner David Stern moved Monday to hush scores of discontented players by shelving Spalding's new microfiber composite ball and authorizing a switch back to the old leather ball for all games starting Jan. 1.
"Our players' response to this particular composite ball has been consistently negative and we are acting accordingly," Stern said in a statement. "Although testing performed by Spalding and the NBA demonstrated that the new composite basketball was more consistent than leather and statistically there has been an improvement in shooting, scoring and ball-related turnovers, the most important statistic is the view of our players."
ESPN.com reported Friday that league officials began contacting all 30 teams late last week to start gauging its supply of leftover leather balls from last season in case the decision to switch came quickly.
The hope now, according to sources, is that the league can get a playable supply of leather balls to each team by Christmas...
[click to enlarge]
A: Every so often, a local television news team stumbles onto a story so disconcerting that it threatens to turn the entire community on its head. When one such story was uncovered by KCRA-3 Sacramento, it would take equal parts perspective, courage, investigative know-how and analytical aptitude to do the drama justice.
What really strikes me here is the quality of both the writing and the performance, and how each complements the other to grab and hold our attention. I may give local newscasters a hard time, but here's one they finally got right.
A: No -- it's COOL-ty to animals!!!!!!
Also, someone in Asia has too much free time. Or possibly everyone in Asia -- between the live-action hamster video games, the robot-bukkake cartoons, the psychedelic game shows and the South Korean labor camps, it's like the whole continent is addicted to WTF.
A: You'll want to...
Kiwi! is the master's thesis animation of School of Visual Arts '06 grad Dony Permedi. If he didn't have a job lined up before this got dugg, he probably will by tomorrow.
Via Honor Patrol (the folks who brought you the Bumper Sticker Yuppie).
Download it in high resolution here.
