Old man #1: I was just admiring your hat. It’s very nice, it makes you look like a cowboy.
Old man #2: Are you hitting on me?
–3 train
Overheard by: Jennifer Smith
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Thought
New Stuff
What happened to summer??? It’s so cold out tonight?
Any who, one my my friends sent me this link: http://www.zefrank.com/theshow – this dude has a really funny (and really truthful – factual) daily video blog. Check it out if you get a chance. Totally worth it…
If you check out Dlisted.com (http://dlisted.blogspot.com) – you will have noticed that the "The CAPTION THIS Contest!" picture submission was actually submitted by your truly "ME", hehe… so funny. But here is the direct link any ways: http://dlisted.blogspot.com/2006/04/caption-this-contest.html
And YES, my real name is Lohan, but that is my first name, not last.
Good night.
Get Him a Plastic Bag and Some Tape
Little boy: The sun is hurting my eyes.
Teen girl: Then don’t look directly at it.
Little boy: But then I can’t see God!
–76th & Broadway
A Cold, Hard Explanation for a Biblical Feat
Findings
A Cold, Hard Explanation for a Biblical Feat
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
Ice on the Sea of Galilee could provide a scientific explanation for walking on water.
Beetles — the unsung soldiers of global warming
Monday, April 3, 2006; Posted: 1:11 p.m. EDT (17:11 GMT)
Beetles
clean the bones of a deer skull.
clean the bones of a deer skull.
As they gnaw away, the stench is overwhelming, a rancid sweetness that stings
the eyes and lungs, clinging to hair and clothes like a vile perfume.
This is the smell of global warming research at work.
The dermestid beetles have been used for decades by museums to clean bones
because of their unmatched ability to strip them without damaging even the
smallest, most delicate specimens.
The skill also makes them valuable to scientists studying global warming,
because they are capable of unveiling the most minute changes in a species.
Though use of the beetles is common across the country, their talent is
increasingly crucial in preparing specimens from the Arctic, where effects of
warming appear first and with greater intensity. The Fairbanks museum is the
largest U.S. repository for high-latitude species.
"Dermestids may be low-tech, but there’s no other method that does as good a
job of cleaning skulls and skeletons for long-term archival preservation," said
Link Olson, curator of the museum’s mammals collection and a biology professor
at the university.
Global warming researchers often have to look for tiny clues in bones to help
them understand even the most minute effects of climate change on animals.
Cleaner bones can give them a more accurate picture of changes.
These drab little bugs are common household pests that eat through furs,
clothing and cereal, shedding their telltale exoskeletons in drawers and
cupboards. At the Fairbanks museum, the "bug room" is secluded from the museum’s
larger collection out of necessity. A dermestid infestation is a curator’s worst
nightmare. There’s not much the bugs won’t eat.
That much was evident on a recent evening when Olson and mammals collection
manager Brandy Jacobsen brought in frozen pieces of a musk ox.
Seemingly oblivious to the smell, Jacobsen set an ox leg and other chunks of
meat under a range hood, where they would air dry for at least two days.
Otherwise the meat would be too wet for the carrion-eating bugs, which were busy
crawling all over the skull of a Sitka blacktail deer and the bones of other
mammals, including a polar bear.
"They only eat dead flesh," Olson said. "They like jerky basically."
Scientists also say the dermestid method is preferable to other methods of
cleaning bones, such as maceration, in which bones are soaked in bacteria-laden
water to break down soft tissue. That can loosen teeth or weaken sutures in
skulls or long bones, Larry Heaney, curator of the division of mammals at the
Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.
Their cleaning prowess is invaluable when measuring changes over extended
periods of time, he said. Researchers are often looking for tiny changes in
density, proportion, shape and size of bones, which can reflect changes in
resources available to the animal.
Israeli scientist Yoram Yom-Tov recently used 400 marten specimens obtained
by the museum during the last 50 years to determine that the small carnivore had
grown over the years by a few percentage points.
The most plausible explanation for the growth is that winters are shorter and
warmer, said Yom-Tov, a professor of zoology at Tel-Aviv University. With a
longer growing season in the Arctic, plants are more available to such prey as
voles, so they become bigger and more plentiful, supplying a greater source of
food for martens, he said.
"What researchers are often looking for at this point are very subtle changes
taking place," Heaney said. "With specimens cleaned by beetles, you can look
very precisely at tiny changes in the anatomy of the animals."
As for the smell?
"It gets more bearable as you get used to it," Jacobsen said.
Copyright 2006 The Associated Press.
All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or
redistributed.
Prehistoric trip to the dentist had to hurt
Primitive
dentists drilled nearly perfect holes into live but undoubtedly unhappy
patients between 5500 B.C. and 7000 B.C., an article in Thursday’s
journal Nature reports.
She Said What I Already Knew
So there i set, reading my book and drinking my coffe. In she came, know not where to sit.
She set right at my table, asking if it was ok. We started talking about her cards, and how she got into handeling them. After several plays and many stears, and the week of fortude and death, she simply said that "The hardest thing in life is to letting go of someone you love, and realizing that they don’t love you".
How true her words were. How much i needed to hear that.
And so it’s done. That one final push i needed.
Goodbye! Till tomorrow.
