Lisa R. gets the coveted Jeff Spicoli no-prize for bringing us news of a rather surprising discovery about who, exactly, is making crop circles "down undah." Beats eating Vegemite!

Best explanation I've ever seen of it. Never have understood why I need to look at a cat's paw under the bathroom door.

New reports are indicating Flight 447 went in belly-first pointing in the right direction. Previous evidence seemed to indicate the aircraft broke up before impact, but this seems to not be the case. Perhaps they'd managed to pull out of their dive, but ran out of altitude before the aircraft had begun to climb again?

Land Rover, of all people, has unveiled what it bills as the "worlds toughest cell phone". Unfortunately no phone is so tough it can't be lost in the side pocket of a back pack. Not that I'd reveal someone who actually did something like that...

Coming soon to a bicycle shop near you: a lantern-like device which uses special LEDs to "draw" a bike lane for you in light as you ride. Anything that makes it easier for a driver to see, and notice, a cyclist is A Good Thing. Exactly how legal it will be, well, I'm not at all sure about that.

An onlooker said: "The men took a lot of care unloading and moving the coffin. They did everything very respectfully."

Wow...sure hope they do it that way, since it's done for everyone else. Caskets aren't cheap. I'm surprised it's not covered in rhinestones.

Meanwhile Jacko's pal and music producer Quincy Jones yesterday vowed NOT to attend the funeral.

Mr Jones said he would not be able to cope with the sadness.

You and the entire continent of Asia.

Article with pix goodness.

Three words: Bikini. Fireworks. Stand. Did I mention how much I love the USA?!? Amazingly, this did not originate in Texas, but rather in Tacoma, Washington. I guess all those stories characterizing the great North West as a bunch of screaming liberal hippies sipping Starbucks in their yurts complaining about "flyover country" and regulating their own children out of the local housing market was a bit of an exaggeration, eh?

Well, probably only a bit...

I'd already decided to wait for the next Transformers movie to come out on video just because it's polling 25% on Rotten. This Transformers "FAQ" just seals the deal. Oh, and Ellen had been calling them "the racist twins" for weeks.

It's a defining moment in a parent's life: Seeing their unborn child's image on an ultrasound for the first time. Now pregnant women could have the chance to hold a life-size model of their unborn baby.

Science can do amazing things.

Yeah, it's dumb, but it's the very first not-quite-official-maybe advertisement for US Alfa Romeos! And the car's pretty neat looking too!

Leave it to the Kiwis to come up with an airline safety tape even I'd pay attention to. Go for the flight attendants wearing body paint. Stay for the flight attendants f-ing up their lines in body paint. Heck it even includes something for the ladies.

No, really:

So it seems that mammalian genomes have been purging themselves from mobile DNA elements just around the KT boundary, give or take a couple of million years. (Or rather: not taking in new elements).

Predictably, nobody's really sure why this is, or what it means.

Mark gets a no-prize that'll complain with impressive theological arguments any time it feels disrespected for bringing us an update on just what, exactly, the Vatican has found buried underneath its altar. To anyone else, the carbon dating results of the human remains found simply do not exclude that they could be of Paul. The rest, as I guess is intended, must be taken on faith.

Making the rounds: an artist has created a "carnivorous clock" which eats bugs to get its power. In the South, we call these "bug zappers."

Jeff Goldblum, as you all will by now know, is dead. How can I be so sure? Just ask him!

The best part is all the footage from Today New Zealand.

I can think of no finer send-up to the center-left elitism I find so common with so many folks I know. The discussions on his board about this one are epic.

I'm laughing precisely because you don't think it's funny.

This one's just too weird, even for Jackson: if this report is to be believed, the King of Pop is going to be plastinated and mounted next to his (now) plastic chimp in an exhibit in downtown London.

The mind boggles...

Via Violins and Starships

Presenting There, I Fixed It, a one-stop-shop for every ad-hoc fix ever imagined. Some are ingenious, most are tacky, and a few are downright terrifying. Suddenly that bailing wire fix we temporarily implemented on the Milano, well, it don't look so bad.

And all this time I thought it'd be the B-52 that would be the weapon system to see active duty in its 100th year:

The U.S. Army was developing a new, semi-robotic, tracked howitzer, as part of the Future Combat Systems family of vehicles. But Secretary of Defense Robert Gates killed FCS, in April. The howitzer — the so-called Non Line-of-Sight Cannon — was funded separately from FCS, so wasn’t subject to the FCS termination.
...
Anticipating NLOS-C’s death, the Senate just voted to spend an extra $60 million, to keep the Army’s existing, M-109A6 Paladin howitzers, in service until 2050. That’s nearly 100 years after the first M-109 entered U.S. service, and 70 years after the A6 version reached the field.

I just wish the Wikipedia article detailed why it's such a long-lived system.

Mark gets a no-prize shaped like a bicycle seat for bringing us news that scientists have discovered elite male cyclists may be doing permanent damage to their reproductive organs. Not as in, "going to grow boobs and start giggling," but as in "no soldiers on the march." I'm not even close to that kind of mileage, so no worries here.