wednesday newstrip

The mother of Australian surfer Mick Fanning says she is "very upset" about a KFC advertisement that parodies her son's famed encounter with a shark, with legal action being taken over the campaign ∙ godless Left gets clear run as media mocks Christian Right, in particular former prom minister Toe Knee Ass-Bit, claims dumped minister P.Rick Aids&abets ∙ pop superstar Robbie Williams has been left red-faced after accidentally telling a sexy secretary joke to a 15-year-old girl on stage in Brisbane ∙ a world-first review of hundreds of studies on ecological change in the world's oceans suggests a global alteration of the marine ecosystem due to increasing CO₂ emissions will result in the collapse of the food chain as we know it ∙ you could almost hear Jeep loyalists let out a collective groan last year when the brand unveiled the Renegade, a $1.5 billion, 90-storey hotel & apartment complex, & thus joined the parade of tiny sport utility vehicles — sometimes called “cute utes” — crowding America's roads.

the eye

Today the
postman brought
me a brochure
from EARWAX—
Extinct Animal
Resurrection With
Academic eXpertise—
suggesting that if
I donated both
money & a sample
of my DNA they
might be able
to bring back
the Amazonian
smilodon. I de-
clined. Now if it
had have been
the Agile frog . . .

wednesday newstrip

Stirred up by Bindi Irwin's emotional performance on Dancing With The Stars, Kim Jong Un said his country was ready to fight any war waged by the United States ∙ Auckland Zoo celebrated the release of its 300th hand-reared kiwi chick by joining a meeting of the security council in Sochi, Russia, chaired by Vladimir Putin ∙ rallies in the Victorian city of Bendigo yesterday drew 600 people for & against the launch of a new series on LifeStyle FOOD ∙ Doctors at the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne are refusing to discharge asylum seeker children, with members saying they cannot ethically let them go back to detention centers.

for Yosa no Buson

lighten

wednesday newstrip

Frogs face mass extinction with new research showing hundreds of species have been lost over three decades due to factors such as pollution, habitat destruction, & a woman who tried to bring cow urine into the country ∙ a simple childish fight over a puppy led an 11-year-old boy to shoot and kill his eight-year-old neighbor in the US state of Tennessee ∙ Pram Minister Malformed Turnip-Ball has hailed the discovery, in a remote area of Indonesia, of a new species of mammal dubbed the hog-nosed rat as "a gigantic foundation stone for our future prosperity" ∙ following the signing of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, New Zealander train passengers can expect some delays & cancellations today.

passing through

A line from Henning Mankell

Just got tumblr for my
blackberry! My lipids
go up. There's a lot of
Winter still to come

so some body fat is a
helpful thing. It's what
cowboy poetry is all
about. Nude therapy

has an indisputable
tabloid character but can
breathe life into a city's
stagnant urban core.

Then a small dog dons
snazzy new pumps &
makes an incisive
contribution to the long-

standing debate over
authenticity in talent
competitions. Gentrification
is far from complete.

R.I.P.

wednesday newstrip

The latest central bank to cut interest rates in an unexpected move has proved no subject is taboo, no public sensibility too sensitive to trash ∙ giant killer lizards will get their first New Zealand public outing as fully-fledged, flying aeronautical wonders during the Warbirds Over Wanaka International Airshow ∙ one of the greatest ways to enjoy the water is out on a kayak. The two students who died in a tragic kayaking incident on Lake Tekapo yesterday were on a break from university ∙ a tiny fossil that was once Mr. Garrison's penis has become the first physical evidence that giant reptiles & the animated adults-only cartoon South Park co-existed for a time during the Pleistocene in Australia ∙ radicalisation kit links green activism and 'alternative music' to a man wearing a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle mask who made off with a BMW motorcycle from a Melbourne car dealership.

able was I

the directions of emotion

What lips my lips have kissed, & where, & why, I have forgotten, & what arms have lain under my head till morning; but the rain is full of ghosts tonight, that tap & sigh upon the glass & listen for reply; & in my heart there stirs a quiet pain for un- remembered lads that not again will turn to me at mid- night with a cry. Thus in the winter stands a lonely tree, nor knows what birds have vanished one by one, yet know its boughs more silent than before: I cannot say what loves have come & gone; I only know that summer sang in me a little while, that in me sings no more.

is no parenthesis & death i think paragraph for life's not a back in my arms laugh, leaning each other: then we are for which says eyelids' flutter is less than your ure of my brain cry—the best gest- all flowers. Don't lady i swear by than wisdom are a better fate approves, & kisses my blood world Spring is in the to be a fool while kiss you; wholly will never wholly syntax of things any attention to the first who pays since feeling is

oncology

wednesday newstrip

Archaeologists have excavated ex-Prom Minister Toe Knee Ass-Bit from a Pre-Roman era tomb at Pompeii, the town buried in a 79AD volcanic eruption ∙ a local Conservative party group has cancelled a planned "pig race" fundraising event after allegations emerged that British Prim Minister David Came*on had inserted his private parts into a dead pig's head at university ∙ a woman is being counselled after allegedly catching a Brisbane childcare worker trying to insert his private parts into her friend's two-year-old son's mouth ∙ new Pram Minister Malformed Turnip-Ball will not live in the official Sydney residence Kirribilli House, preferring instead to stay in his $50 million harborside mansion ∙ scientists have discovered that supermassive black holes spiraling towards one another can communicate between themselves by humming at incredibly low frequencies.

Can we go now?

The 2015 Ig Nobel Awards

It's been a while since I noted one of my favorite lists. I'm rectifying that omission now.

CHEMISTRY PRIZE — For inventing a chemical recipe to partially un-boil an egg.

Callum Ormonde and Colin Raston [Australia], and Tom Yuan, Stephan Kudlacek, Sameeran Kunche, Joshua N. Smith, William A. Brown, Kaitlin Pugliese, Tivoli Olsen, Mariam Iftikhar, Gregory Weiss [USA]

PHYSICS PRIZE — For testing the biological principle that nearly all mammals empty their bladders in about 21 seconds (plus or minus 13 seconds).

Patricia Yang [USA and Taiwan], David Hu [USA and Taiwan], and Jonathan Pham, Jerome Choo [USA]

LITERATURE PRIZE — For discovering that the word "huh?" (or its equivalent) seems to exist in every human language — and for not being quite sure why.

Mark Dingemanse [The Netherlands, USA], Francisco Torreira [The Netherlands, Belgium, USA], and Nick J. Enfield [Australia, The Netherlands]

MANAGEMENT PRIZE — For discovering that many business leaders developed in childhood a fondness for risk-taking, when they experienced natural disasters (such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, and wildfires) that — for them — had no dire personal consequences.

Gennaro Bernile [Italy, Singapore, USA], Vineet Bhagwat [USA], and P. Raghavendra Rau [U.K., India, France, Luxembourg, Germany, Japan]

ECONOMICS PRIZE — The Bangkok Metropolitan Police [Thailand], for offering to pay policemen extra cash if the policemen refuse to take bribes.

MEDICINE PRIZE — For experiments to study the biomedical benefits or biomedical consequences of intense kissing (and other intimate, interpersonal activities).

Awarded jointly to two groups: Hajime Kimata [Japan, China]; and to Jaroslava Durdiaková [Slovakia, USA, U.K.], Peter Celec [Slovakia, Germany], Natália Kamodyová, Tatiana Sedláčková, Gabriela Repiská, Barbara Sviežená, and Gabriel Minárik [Slovakia]

MATHEMATICS PRIZE — For trying to use mathematical techniques to determine whether and how Moulay Ismael the Bloodthirsty, the Sharifian Emperor of Morocco, managed, during the years from 1697 through 1727, to father 888 children.

Elisabeth Oberzaucher [Austria, Germany, U.K.] and Karl Grammer [Austra, Germany]

BIOLOGY PRIZE — For observing that when you attach a weighted stick to the rear end of a chicken, the chicken then walks in a manner similar to that in which dinosaurs are thought to have walked.

Bruno Grossi, Omar Larach, Mauricio Canals, Rodrigo A. Vásquez [Chile], José Iriarte-Díaz [Chile, USA]

DIAGNOSTIC MEDICINE PRIZE — For determining that acute appendicitis can be accurately diagnosed by the amount of pain evident when the patient is driven over speed bumps.

Diallah Karim [CANADA, U.K.], Anthony Harnden [New Zealand, U.K., USA], Nigel D’Souza [Bahrain, Belgium, Dubai, India, South Africa, USA, U.K.], Andrew Huang [China, U.K.], Abdel Kader Allouni [Syria, U.K.], Helen Ashdown [U.K.], Richard J. Stevens [U.K.], and Simon Kreckler [U.K.]

PHYSIOLOGY and ENTOMOLOGY PRIZE — For carefully arranging for honey bees to sting him repeatedly on 25 different locations on his body, to learn which locations are the least painful (the skull, middle toe tip, and upper arm). and which are the most painful (the nostril, upper lip, and penis shaft).

Awarded jointly to two individuals: Justin Schmidt [USA, Canada], for painstakingly creating the Schmidt Sting Pain Index, which rates the relative pain people feel when stung by various insects; and to Michael L. Smith [USA, U.K., The Netherlands]

FULL LIST with Scientific References can be found at Ig Nobel website, www.improbable.com.

wednesday newstrip

Three new bee species with unusually narrow heads & long mouths have been discovered by Oroton Group's big-ticket handbags, pushing the label back towards profit growth & driving its transformation from a mid-market discounter to an Australian luxury label ∙ an Australian photographer has captured a rare moment of animal communion with a shot of a seal humping a surfbreak whale off the New South Wales coast ∙ new Pram Minister & well-known dick tech head, Malformed Turnip-Ball, will not be going ahead with a Silicon Valley trade mission planned by his predecessor now that researchers have found asbestos in the crayons there ∙ severe storms on the New South Wales Central Coast have left a thick blanket of potentially harmful nanoparticles of titanium dioxide & silica covering roads & causing power disruptions to hundreds of homes.

intaglio

Adrenal Fatigue