They named it J-Lo!

Last night my sister Michelle (who lives in Cleveland) sent me the following news story.

This news takes place in my local area of Ocala, Florida and is about a chicken with two rear ends.

Cindy and I hadn’t even read the story yet, and we began discussing it based on the link text. Being the kind-hearted gal she is, Cindy felt sorry for the chicken. Being the ever-hungry devourer of egg and fowl that I am (they call me El Voraz Devorador de Pollo), I wondered if this hexed hen could lay twice the normal number of succulent eggs.

Since the chicken appears to be the result of a natural mutation, I don’t feel any special pangs of sympathy for the critter – it’s not as if it’s the unfortunate result of a diabolical gene-splicing experiment gone wrong.

If this hen and others like it could be bred with similar roosters, we might end up with super egg-layers within a few short delicious generations.

After reading the story, we discovered the chicken does not lay two eggs at the same time (which apparently is better for the chicken, since twice the eggs would mean a calcium deficiency – but could we not give the chicken supplements?).

Raising half the number of chickens means fewer to care for while maintaining the same egg production - this should equal more resources for the chickens, and hopefully better conditions, more elbow room (wing room?) in the pens, and etc.

Thoughts?

My Vote: Sex, Nap, Sex

I’m not usually very interested in news reports, but I’ve spotted a few over the past few days that have caught my eye.

I’ve been skimming Google News more often lately, which is probably why. I can’t stand to listen to broadcast news, since there’s just so much going on that I could care less about.

Such as: ‘Was the death of the local girl (insert name here for your locality) the fault of the parents?’ Let’s endlessly debate this from every conceivable angle until I might just confess myself to make it all stop.

So yeah, Google News, with the good and skimming along until you find something that attracts your interest (there are automated news alerts you can set up, for any key words you like – Google will email you links to the stories containing your keywords).

This story is about a plane that stopped responding to radio transmissions for 88 minutes, and flew 110 miles past the airport where they were to due to land.


Supposedly, the pilots were distracted by a discussion about airline policy. Sounds unlikely.

What could they have been doing for 88 minutes?

Let’s see:

Having sex with one another
(Men? Sex for 88 mins? Maybe 8 mins)

Having sex with ‘sexy stews’
(See above)

Dealing with a hijacker
(Possible)

Testing a remote-override control to deal with future hijackings
(Possible)

Dealing with a UFO
(An unidentified flying object, not an alien spacecraft)
(Possible)

Dealing with an alien spacecraft
(Possible)

Flew through a distortion field of some sort which rendered everone unconscious
(Unlikely - passengers were awake the whole time)

The story mentions that an airplane's black box only records for 30 minutes, after which it is written over - so this could mean that they were perhaps struggling with an issue for 58 minutes, and then the pilots felt the need to wait an additional 30 minutes for the recording to begin its overwrite.

Only 30 minutes on a black box, seriously? In a day & age where I can walk into my local electronics store and purchase terabytes of storage capacity, there's no excuse for this. New rule - every microsecond of every flight is going to be saved, stored forever, reviewed, and scored down to the tiniest detail. 30 minutes, good grief.

Damn it, why did I promise them donuts?

About to be late for morning department meeting, unless there is a fortuitous fluctuation of the timestream, just enough to get me there on time but not enough to rend the space/time continuum in twain. But real quick-like...

Have you heard of the recent series of 'mysterious' severing of multiple undersea telecommunications cables?..News

If I were a suspicious man, I'd say someone (likely an evil government bent on world domination - my money is on the U.S.) had a handy little ROV with a big pair of snippers on one end.

I'd say we ran a series of supercomputer simulations to predict the outcome of the loss of each cable, then cut them one at a time to correct any errors in our simulation. See, when the day comes that we decide to cut these cables again, we have to be sure our overseas embassy's or military networks aren't effected. It's what I would do.
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If Cats Cared for Broadcast Journalism**

"We all groom ourselves with our tongues, but we'll tell you the three deadly places to lick yourself...Tonight on the Fox 4 11 O'clock News."
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**I would have said "If Cats Ruled the World", but of course they already do.