Q: Was headline also partly swallowed by shark?

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.

Q: But seriously, what the hell is going on with these gas-related disasters and dead birds?

A: I was both amused and slightly frightened by this pair of Wonkette posts Monday, noting that there was a ton of fucked-up shit going on pretty much everywhere in the world, much of it involving natural gas mishaps (slash mercaptan mishaps).

One standout disaster was that of Austin, Texas, where the downtown area had to be shut down as the streets were suddenly littered with the corpses of 60 birds, all dead for no known reason. Which is, you know, a little creepy.

So it was even creepier when the news broke that the same thing was happening around the same time on the other side of the globe, in Esperance, Australia -- except in Esperance, it wasn't just 60 birds. It was, like, all of them. Said local Michelle Crisp, "We literally didn't have any birds left to die."
For some reason, very few media outlets or bloggers seem to be noting the strange connection here.¹ But is anyone else starting to feel like this is the opening 15 minutes to an apocalyptic disaster movie? I'm particularly concerned for my precocious daughter Dakota Fanning, to whom I've never been a very good father.

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While I'm on the subject of weird coincidences: A couple of days ago, these two unrelated, yet totally dueling, stories popped up in my RSS feeder, literally one item apart:

• Black Diamonds Are From Outer Space [Discovery.ca]
• Black Diamonds Are From Inner Cleveland [IRockCleveland]

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¹ Or possibly all of them are talking about it. I'm way behind in my reading.