Category: General

Things I’ve left at Ursula’s lately:

My apple spice yogurt (fruit on the bottom) from Safeway
My sunglasses
The audio book that I bought via eBay from some lady named Bernice for 99 cents and I didn’ t pay shipping because we arranged to exchange money at Bread Garden at 14th & Granville. No, I didn’t buy anything while I was there.

Michael sent me this link of a guy who made his computer case look like it could be H.P. Lovecraft’s pet…or something. It’s hard to describe so if you’re interested go to http://www.stonehill.org/casenotnamed/

Today was a day of much fun. I played tennis with Sheri & Stephane and then I went to my favourite movie theater and met with Yvonne and Janet for Napoleon Dynamite and truly, it lived up to its name. My funny bone was suitably tickled. Toren recommends. Then as we left the theater and were talking about the film we ran into John Crawford so we walked with him into Chinatown where we gave some directions to an old Italian couple and then went across the street to Buddhist Vegetarian Restaurant and Brian joined us for a yummy dinner with a heaping portion of chitchat and book reviews. I poured my tea into my soup bowl and was embarrassed. After that John left and we drove to Ursula’s for some Mario Party 2. There were five of us so Yvonne and I had to tagteam it, and we came in last.

In Sudan, Arab militias have been slaughtering and raping black farmers, then some of the militia members (Janjaweed) were sentenced to have hands and feet amputated.

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California called his Democratic opponents “girlie men.” [New York Times]

Mexico’s attorney general was implanted with computer chips that broadcast his location and his identity; security experts said that publicly revealing the existence of the location chip was unwise, since kidnappers could simply remove the chip. [Ananova]

Martha Stewart was sentenced to five months in prison.

A first draft of the dog genome was released. [NIH]
Phew! Lucky for the dog! Think of all that waiting for its genome!

A mule reportedly gave birth in Bhutan.

Public-health experts said that 40 percent of the residents of Los Angeles County get no more than 10 minutes of exercise per week.

Some drug companies were thinking about banning people who respond to placebos from clinical trials. [New Scientist]

Scientists said that they could estimate how many years a woman has left before the onset of menopause by using a technique called transvaginal sonography. [New Scientist]

In Florida, a man was accused of beating his girlfriend with a pet alligator. [Independent]

The Japanese plotted to blow up the Loch Ness Monster but Scottish wizards cast a protective spell on Nessie and the Scots in the area to protect them [Napoleon Dynamite]

During my vacation into the bush, one sunny day in the early afternoon I was writing outside, around the fire pit. I noticed some kind of weird-looking bug crawling across the pit. Upon closer inspection I saw that it was an ichneumon wasp burdened with its prey – some kind of grub. I should point out for those who don’t know – the ichneumon wasp is a type of wasp (there are 6000+ species of ichneumons) that lays its eggs inside a stinger-paralyzed but living host. The eggs don’t kill the host until the wasp larvae hatch – at which point the wasp babies have their fresh breakfast. The host (usually larvae of moths, butterflies, and suchlike) may even metamorphosize before the eggs hatch. With that out of the way, I was watching this wasp carrying arount some grub. The grup was as big as the wasp – bigger even, so the wasp couldn’t fly with it. Somewhere across the middle of the pit the wasp dropped the larva and started flying around it. I thought what an unfortunate place to decide to lay your eggs – they won’t survive the next fire. But soon I realized that the wasp was confused and was flying around and around, searching for its payload, and as it flew the tiny draft from the beating of its wings kicked up the ashes and created little miniature dust storms – no doubt disoriented the wasp further still. I almost wanted the help the little bastard but then I thought ew, parasitic wasp! Nevertheless I started looking for the grub which had fallen behind a chunk of charcoal. I poked around with a stick and realized that the embers were still warm from the fire the night before. This may have been why the wasp dropped the larva – its tiny shoeless footies got too hot. I decided to see if I had enough wilderness survival savvy to start a blaze from the ashes in the pit, without the aid of matches, etc. I put some dry leaves under some chunks of coal and blew on it. It took a few moments but eventually I got the fire started again! That was fun, but I put it out after it burned for a couple of minutes because it was already hot out and for all I knew there may have been a fire ban. I never did find that grub though, and the wasp flew off, presumably to find another hapless victim.