Crocodiles scare the crap out of me. In fact, I think they’re the scariest things on the planet. Gators make a close second. But they aren’t just monsters to humans. It appears gators have got blood that’s an infection’s worst nightmare.
So I predict right here that in the not too distant future we’re going to have a product called “Gator Cream” and it will rival the wonderful Neosporin.
I miss the squirrels we had at the old homestead. No, that’s not hyperbole. Until two years ago the six of us lived in a 900 sf home my wife’s grandmother homesteaded for. But that’s beside the point. We had squirrels there. They chittered, ran about, tossed apples down at my girls when they tried to inhabit the hammock.
For those of you not from Utah, you might be wondering why this is such a big deal. If you’re from the East you might be thinking I’m nuts. But out West trees are few and far between, which means so are the squirrels. So we loved our squirrels, but then they got into our neighbor’s fifth wheel and he promptly killed them all.
Alas.
But here, for your pleasure, are squirrels using their god-given intelligence to do what they were bred to do–steal and eat.
Of course, they are squirrels. Not quite geniuses yet.
One of my stories either needs a squirrel who steals candy bars or a character who is constantly setting up obstacle courses for the varmits.
I thought all such things were hoaxes. Above is a picture of John after having been found and saved.
John Ssebunya, the Ugandan Monkey Boy
Date found: 1991
Age when found: 6
Location: Uganda
Years in the wild: 3
Animals: monkeys
John ran and hid in a forest, about 2-3 km from his house after witnessing the murder of his mother by his father. His father was known to be an alcoholic and violent.
John says he was so frightened of his father that he stayed in the forest. It is possible that he had some degree of mental handicap at that time and this may have contributed to the fact that he did not understand that he should have sought help from other adults.
He was aged roughly 4 or 5 at the time that he was found in 1989 according to witnesses like Mrs Milly Sseba who found him in the forest. There is no birth certificate…
John identified the mokes as Cercopithicus Aethiops (the common African Grey or Green Vervet Monkey). This is very significant as this is one of the very few species of mammal that lives in social groups and will accept and tolerate a lone individual of another species of monkey living alongside their group. Other monkeys and apes will not do this — chimpanzees for example would simply eat a human child.
Indeed zing, but heart wrenching.
An aquaintance of mine is in Cambodia and Thailand. Luckily she’s taking pictures. Check this one out. Is that not marvelous? Does that not belong in a story?
How would you like to eat cuts from slabs of meat grown from stem cells?
Give the cells some water, glucose and natural proteins. To make sure you have something that feels like meat you “exercise” the muscle with electrical pulses.
Gross? Maybe. But someone is thinking about it.
http://www.popsci.com/environment/gallery/2008-09/inside-vertical-skyscraper
As with all zing, post story ideas in the comments.
When you live where we do, you cannot hope to landscape likes folks in a warm suburb. First of all, at 6,000 feet with a min temp of -30 Fahrenheit you can’t grow a lot of warmer climate plants. Second, the deer seem to eat everything else you do grow. So we’ve been looking and I think I’ve found a tree to add.
I actually found it earlier when I was biking around the beautiful Round Valley and had to stop and go back to revel in the delicious fragrance. But I didn’t know what it was at the time. I do now.
It’s the black chokecherry.
It grows naturally up here. Has beautiful fragrant blossoms in the spring. And it produces fruit that can be made into a delicious syrup. Oh, the raccoons like it as well.
Now when you eat the raw berry, unless you eat it late in the fall, you’re in for an astringent, alum after-punch. But we picked the berries up a canyon behind our town after the first frosts. In fact, many of our berries were wrinkled. They just fine raw. Even Lilia, my pickiest eater, enjoyed them.
We picked about 1.25 gallon ice cream buckets of the stuff. Then we followed this recepie and made about 4 quarts of syrup.
It’s absolutely delicious on pancakes.
This geeked me out today.
THE internet could soon be made obsolete. The scientists who pioneered it have now built a lightning-fast replacement capable of downloading entire feature films within seconds.
At speeds about 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection, “the grid” will be able to send the entire Rolling Stones back catalogue from Britain to Japan in less than two seconds.
The latest spin-off from Cern, the particle physics centre that created the web, the grid could also provide the kind of power needed to transmit holographic images; allow instant online gaming with hundreds of thousands of players; and offer high-definition video telephony for the price of a local call.
Can you imagine that game world? Can you imagine a world that’s an actual world? Where adventurers set out to find fortune and encounter all sorts of nasties being played by hundreds of thousands of other people around the globe?
Dude.
Zing, Baby!
