Oddities and Humor

I followed Pogo, from inception to the death of Walt Kelly. One of the great comic characters.

Walt Kelly has earned immortality for many accomplishments but, for me, he will always be remembered as the first to coin the expression, "We have met the enemy and they are...us."

One of my favorite Walt Kelly story lines involved presenting Spiro Agnew as a hyena.

Not sure if this is odd enough to qualify....but I just had my car hit by a bicycle, which is against the natural order of predation, I think.

I was waiting quietly at a red light, and it hit me!

Only a little hit, fortunately.

Was it a hit and run?

Not really.....he just stayed behind me until the light changed.

He looked fine and I figured if it hadn't hurt his bike hadn't hurt my car.

Good thing it was you. Dave woulda just blown him away with somepiece of artillery,

I guess if I'd been angry I could've got out and farted on him.

Oh Yeh. We have a coopers hawk that lives in our silo and eats pigeons and other birds. Well, we are at a seasonal low for pigeons so the hawk has adjusted his hunting m o. SInce weve had some snow and the grounds covered with about 3" of the stuff, we keep the birdie feeders well stocked. Each morning, as the little birds congregate at the feeders, the hawk takes up a stalking post in pone of the nearby trees that surround the area. The hawk will wait until there is just enough of a gaggle of birdies so its a confusion of beaks and feet and fluttering abvout.
Then the hawk will come in like an F22 and scare the birds. Many of the birds fly strait into our back porch windows ,thus stunning themselves. AT that point the hawk just flies up, goes into a stoop, and is all over the stunned birds.
TODAY WERE DIFFERENT

This AM I was on the sun porch reading and I heard the telltale "Thump" of a bird hitting window. AT that point I quickly went outside to the patio and saw the hawk diving straight down. He saw me, and quickly reversed his motion and in mid flight did a complete tumble and then he flew back towards the barn area. Really cool behavior and now that Im part of it, I wonder how the hawk will figure out how to outsmart me?
The little purple finch was fine, he probably just had a headache

"Your honour, How can you possibly dismiss this case? The Christians have Christmas, Easter and others. The Jews have Passover, Yom Kippur and Hanukkah, yet my client and all other atheists have no such holidays."
The judge leaned forward in his chair saying, "But you do. Your client, counsel, is woefully ignorant."
The lawyer said, "Your Honour, we are unaware of any special observance or holiday for atheists."
The judge said, "The calendar says April 1st is April Fools Day. Psalm 14:1 states, 'The fool says in his heart, there is no God.' Thus, it is the opinion of this court, that, if your client says there is no God, then he is a fool. Therefore, April 1st is his day.
Court is adjourned."

The buzzards are going hungry in these parts. Lately, we have seen them raiding garbage cans. They grab the bags with their feet and toss them to the ground. They rip them open and eat whatever it is they smell in there.

Oh, man, fm, reading that was like a deja vu. At least it brought back some sharp memories of Winters in New Hampshire. The hawk I saw take out a bluejay feedng off the ground, right under the feeder where the finches and chickadees and other small songbirds fed, wasn't a Cooper's. If Iremember aright, it was a gosshawk. Pair of jays. One hawk. Hawk comes out of nowhere, hits one jay smack in the back and gathers him up. The other jay just takes off real quick-like, no sqawk, no sound of any kind. Jays are generally noisy; I'd never seen one act like that.

Purple finches and others used to crash into windows all the time. Didn't need a hawk chasing 'em.

Don't know if this is fact or fiction:

A toothpaste factory had a problem: they sometimes shipped empty boxes, without the tube inside. This was due to the way the production line was set up, and people with experience in designing production lines will tell you how difficult it is to have everything happen with timings so precise that every single unit coming out of it is perfect 100% of the time. Small variations in the environment (which can’t be controlled in a cost-effective fashion) mean you must have quality assurance checks smartly distributed across the line so that customers all the way down to the supermarket don’t get hacked off and buy another product instead.

Understanding how important that was, the CEO of the toothpaste factory got the top people in the company together, and they decided to start a new project, in which they would hire an external engineering company to solve their empty box's problem, as their engineering department was already too stretched to take on any extra effort

The project followed the usual process: budget and project sponsor allocated, RFP, third-parties selected, and six months (and $8 million) later they had a fantastic solution ­ on time, on budget, high quality and everyone involved in the project had a great time.

They solved the problem by using high-tech precision scales that would sound a bell and flash lights whenever a toothpaste box weighed less than it should. The line would stop; someone would walk over and yank the defective box off of it, pressing another button when done to re-start the line.

A while later, the CEO decides to have a look at the Return On Investment of the project: amazing results! No empty boxes ever shipped out of the factory after the scales were put in place. Very few customer complaints and they were gaining market share. “That’s some money well spent!” he said, before looking closely at the other statistics in the report.

It turns out, the number of defects picked up by the scales was 0 after three weeks of production use. It should have picked up at least a dozen a day, so maybe there was something wrong with the report. He requested an inquiry, and after some investigation, the engineers come back saying the report was actually correct. The scales really weren't picking up any defects, because all boxes that got to that point in the conveyor belt were good.

Puzzled, the CEO travelled down to the factory, and walked up to the part of the line where the precision scales were installed.

A few feet before the scale, there was a cheap desk fan, blowing the empty boxes out of the belt and into a bin.

“Oh, that,” says one of the workers ­ “one of the guys put it there 'cause, he was tired of walking over every time the bell rang."

Priceless. I do hope it's a true story. I could Snopes it, I suppose, but I'm just too lazy.

No humor, but an oddity. Just played The Maori Farewell on the radio thread.

PARIS – On Monday, after two decades of resistance, France returned to New Zealand the mummified heads of 20 Maori warriors that have been held in French museums for more than two centuries.

French Culture Minister Frédéric Mitterrand and New Zealand’s ambassador Rosemary Banks presided over a solemn ceremony with music, singing and calls to the spirits of ancestors at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris. “You are the breath of life, you, our forefathers,” Derek Lardelli, a Maori elder, intoned at the ceremony.

The Maoris traditionally preserved the tattooed heads of warriors killed in battle to keep their memory alive. In the 19th century, as contact with outsiders increased, a trade in Maori body parts flourished as a result of a European penchant for collecting Maori remains. Tattooed Maori fighters sometimes were in danger of being killed so their heads could be sold. Some Maori slaves were forcibly tattooed, then decapitated.

The odd thing is the French resistance to returning the heads, inexcusable.

These would be the same French government that is razzing the Turks for their genocidal actions against Armenians.

Study finds that Facebook users have low self-esteem

Last year, a pair of studies showed that heavy Facebook users have more grey matter in their brains and are subject to a condition known as Facebook Depression. A new study from Utah Valley University suggests heavy users of Facebook may also share another trait: low self-esteem.

The study surveyed 425 college students about their use of social networking use, in addition to questions about how they spent their time socializing offline. Students who spent the most time on Facebook were the most likely to agree with the statement that others had better lives than they did. Those who were more likely to friend people on Facebook they did not personally know were the most likely to believe that others were happier than they were. The study doesn't single out Facebook as the cause of low self-esteem — it could simply mean that people with low self-esteem are more likely to friend strangers than those with happy and healthy offline lives.

Logically, the study makes a lot of sense. When you're constantly bombarded with pictures from friends' vacations, news of new relationships, and videos of last weekend's party, it's easy to feel that others are leading busier and more enjoyable lives than you are. Especially when negative aspects of peoples' lives such as loneliness, sadness, and failure are often minimized or unshared.

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/technology-blog/study-finds-facebook-users-low-self-esteem-034335452.html



It doesn't speculate about a2k participants, fortunately...

Facebook is not fun.