The Harper’s Weekly Review has become the sort of thing I never feel like reading, but then when I do get around to it I am filled with delight.

Here are some of my favorite news items referenced in this week’s review:

Dynamite found in college student’s luggage at George Bush Intercontinental Airport.

Half of evangelical Christian men can’t seem to get enough porno.

Terrorists will be kung-fued if they try shit on Sichuan Airlines in the future.

Giving up on trying to catch and ‘fix’ kangaroos, Canberra scientists are turning to oral contraception.

A woman who busts nut 40 times a day and went all over television to talk about it exposed herself as a housing benefit fraudster.

Posted: August 29th, 2006 under Miscellaneous.
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I just got back from a big meetup of friends last weekend where I got to get up close and personal with two types of animals I really know very little about.

Animal the first: Brown Bat

I have caught glimpses of bats in the Sierras, looking out over the sides of cliffs at dusk. They’re hard to see because it’s night time, but if you chuck a pebble into the air at the right moment, one or more of the black splotches flopping around in the air will change course to confirm that the rock is not a tasty insect. I’d never gotten close to one in the wild because Batman still won’t let me in his HQ. This little fellow, on the other hand, I pet.
This bat somehow stole into my friend Mark’s house one night, and Mark trapped it between the window and the bug screen in the bathroom.
I stood on the ground below the second story window when he punched the screen out of the frame to free the bat. It took to winged flight halfway through its free fall and alit on this branch in the neighbor’s sideyard. I went up and hazarded a pat of it’s astonishingly soft fur before running back into the house to grab my camera. The bat was very accommodating.

Animal the second: Honey Bees

Mark and Tracy have lately acquired around 180,000 bees and hives in which to collect their honey. They were nice enough to let me get my first up close and personal beehive experience (protective netwear included). I took photos.
There are three gooey substances in a beehive: honey, beeswax, and propolis — the glue that they smear everything with. When we opened the hive there was almost no reaction on the part of the bees, who remained more or less ignorant of our presence throughout the process of inspecting their brood chambers.
I had been stung the previous day while playing catch barefoot on the back lawn, and decided that bee stings just aren’t as big a deal now that I’m all grownsed up, but I’m glad they didn’t respond defensively to my copious photographing and Tracy and Scott’s disassembly of their place of work.

Posted: August 22nd, 2006 under Miscellaneous.
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Posted: August 9th, 2006 under Coffee Shops.
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So while we’re all hard at work fucking the planet up and waging wars all over the place, NASA is expanding our horizons with a planned invasion of the moon. They’re sending a manned mission back to good old Luna, my favorite of all the colonies the US has established, and they’re naming the rocket Ares after the ancient Greek god of war.

Laughable. I can say no more.

Posted: August 4th, 2006 under Politics.
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