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Küng, 41, rents out her guinea pigs, a service that has been in high demand in the Alpine nation ever since animal welfare rules were tightened up a few years ago. Switzerland has forbidden people from keeping lone guinea pigs because the animals are sociable and need each other’s company.

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Presumably there’s a measuring stick somewhere that has the appropriate units for ‘intensity’.

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Lock your doors….

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A working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research finds that the declining use of cigarettes explains our obesity rates.

No good deed goes unpunished.

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Yesterday police in Springfield, Oregon, acting on a tip from the FBI, broke into a man’s condominium to prevent him from killing himself. They believed the situation was urgent because the man had purchased a mail-order suicide kit. Seven months ago. For a local newspaper reporter who was doing a story about suicide kits.

Well, you don’t want to rush these things….

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A 90-year-old Brazilian man has fathered at least 50 children by four different women – including his sister-in-law and his mother-in-law.

Must be that funky Latin beat.

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South Africa’s foreign minister spent £20,000 on a private jet after getting into a shouting match with security officials at Oslo airport when she refused to let them X-ray her handbag, it has emerged.

Well, let’s see what we can observe from this incident.

1. Members of the Crust have no hesitation in squandering taxpayers’ money to suit their own convenience.
2. Even members of the Crust can run afoul of the Security State.
3. Diplomatic immunity doesn’t mean what it used to.

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The world is full of pointless activity.

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Professor at his first lecture of the semester to Canadian university students: “Despite what you may have heard elsewhere, everyone is not entitled to their opinion. ‘All Jews should be sterilized’ would be an example of an unacceptable and dangerous opinion.”

Student misunderstands, and launches attack on professor for being anti-Semitic. When the context was explained to her, she refused to relent: “The words, ‘Jews should be sterilized’ still came out of his mouth, so regardless of the context I still think that’s pretty serious.” (Anyone who says “Jehovah” will get stoned!)

So a professor urging his students to be Politically Correct gets busted for being Politically Incorrect. We live in the Irony Age.

More here. This is going to provide right-wing humor for at least a year.

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Last month WEAC announced that it was laying off 40% of its staff.  With little over which to collectively bargain, and with dues no longer withheld from paychecks, the need for and sustainability of a union bureaucracy could not be justified.

Now WEAC is being boycotted by National Staff Organization (NSO), a union representing educational union employees.

Isn’t that great, education union employees have their own union?  Is there a union for employees of education union employee unions?

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Further adventures in the mythical world of ‘intellectual property’.

‘Nobody knows who owns the rights to these books, but we’re a group of authors and so we have the right to stop you using them!’ Uh, guys, mind your own business. If you have an interest here (i.e. it’s one of your books), then come talk to us. Otherwise, STFU.

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The fashion industry has its knickers in a twist over “manties.” A contraction of “man” and “panties,” the wordplay is meant to describe certain undergarments for males.

It’s part of a special lexicon that has emerged, over the past decade, as a sort of shorthand for men’s fashion. Men can also wear “mandals” (male sandals), “murses” (purses), “mantyhose” (pantyhose) and “mankinis” (swimsuit variants)—though not necessarily all at the same time.

You knew it had to happen.

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A mother-of-two had a ‘first date from hell’ after she was duped into becoming the getaway driver for a thief she met on Facebook.

Leah Gibbs, 23, had planned to spend an evening watching a DVD and getting to know 21-year-old Adam Minton.  

But instead, when she arrived at his home, he asked her to give him a lift – claiming he briefly had to visit a friend.

 She drove him to a shopping area, where he left her for five minutes. When he returned in a panic he ordered her to: “Go, go, go!” 

That fizzing sound is my trying to keep from laughing.

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Not bad, for a Communist country.

Here’s proof.

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Ah, the New York Times. Once the paper of record, now the paper that has broken all records for idiocy and irrelevance brings us the ruminations of a dozen “Americans who don’t labor in politics or the media” on “what they’d do if they were president.”

Searching for, ” ideas that might challenge or inspire, ” Jesse Kornbluth assembled a group of 12 illuminati and asked them what they would do if they lived in the White House.

The responses, which come from professors, authors, a CEO, a nun, the president of something called the Children’s Zone in Harlem, an artist, an inventor and an astrophysicist, read like a perverse combination of Rainbow Fish and Pedro’s campaign speech from Napoleon Dynamite. (Vote for me and your wildest dreams will come true.)

An exellent fisking of peripheral members of the cognitive elite; not one person who ever made something intended for sale, all people dependent on existence in an apex civilization such as ours. I’d be more interested in how well they would survive if stripped naked and dropped in the Pacific Northwest. I suspect that the ‘inventor’ might make it out alive, but the rest would be bear-food.

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Look at the picture. Quick, which one is the First Black President?

Answer: The one who looks like a white guy.

There’s modern America for you.

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We’ll swap you one of Obama’s kids for Prince Harry.

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NCAA bans use of skraeling names. (Can’t be insensitive, you know, not that it’s any of the NCAA’s business.)

North Dakota university sues NCAA. (Butt out. None of your business. We’re proud of our Fighting Sioux.)

University settles with NCAA; name to be discontinued. (Academics cave under charges of raaaaaaaacism, as usual.)

North Dakota passes law ordering that the name be kept. (Nyaa, nyaa.)

A quartet of skraeling students, under the wing of a law firm famous for greenmail class-actions against corporations, sue the university, the governor, the legislature (and probably George W. Bush, for all I know). (Sue! Sue! It’s what Americans do!)

So your guess is as good as mine — except that I can’t help but think that everybody involved has better things to do rather than sue about the Sioux.

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This is getting extremely silly. You’d think these guys had better things to do with their time.

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We need more deranged leaders: mad science turns its baleful stare upon political science.  Nassir Ghaemi’s thesis is that certain types of mental illness make for better leaders.  Sanity is not only overrated, but saps a leader’s abilities.

Unfortunately, all we get are stupid, corrupt, and greedy ones.

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I’m not sure how walking across Australia is going to raise money for charity, unless there are people out there with money who are actually sillier than this guy, depressing though that prospect might be.

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A retired widow who says a brain tumour turned her late husband into a transvestite has launched a £500,000 High Court battle against his decision to cut her out of his will.

And you thought you had troubles….

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If, of course, that’s something that you want to do.

The company sees two markets for their stove: Families in developing countries, and avid backpackers and campers.

Of course. Everyone who has to burn wood for cooking needs his mobile phone charged. That makes perfect sense.

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Charles Imwalle, 41, of Lake Mary filed a lawsuit Monday against Winn-Dixie and Passion Growers LLC claiming he suffered pain, disfigurement, medical bills and lost wages after pricking his finger on a thorn from a rose he purchased from his local Winn-Dixie in February, the Orlando (Fla.) Sentinel reported Thursday.

Goodness, what a prick.

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And, quite frankly, never gave a shit about….

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Irony is no longer a course module in the Home Ec curriculum.

Tyler Cowen has the skinny.

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know….

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The nanny state run wild.

Actually, we ought to be grateful to San Francisco — they do all the stupid things so we don’t have to.

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A Russian woman died of a heart attack at her own funeral, after waking up to find praying mourners filing past her coffin.

Not something you see every day.

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The motif reminded an audience in little peril of forgetting that the occasion solemnized a transition from one phase of life, marked by potty-training and learning to sit criss-cross applesauce for story time, to a period of loftier pursuits: tying your own shoes, sounding out words, being the line leader, and other such stuff as dreams are made on.

How precious.

Cynics, of course, are fond of scoffing at occasions such as these. Graduation ceremonies—for pre-kindergarteners? You cannot be serious!

No. They cannot. Pre-schoolers have not yet learned what a serious place the world can be—which is why they remain, to borrow a phrase from Robert Brustein’s Letters to a Young Actor, “the living embodiment of the audience’s joys and fears.”

Not to mention a bottomless hole for cookies and juice.

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If Oxford is the home of lost causes, California appears to be the Quonset hut of stupid ones. The latest to excite municipal legislators’ brains (in San Francisco and Santa Monica, anyway—Barstow and Fresno appear unaffected at this writing) is anti-circumcision. The author of ballot measures banning the practice in both burgs is one Matthew Hess, who has composed a comic book to further the cause. More of that momentarily.

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The man, who has not been identified, is married to a Frenchwoman, but does not allow her to leave the family home freely, it was claimed.

I hate to see evidence that the French are ahead of us in anything, but this….

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This is, of course, like members of a synagogue distributing free copies of Mein Kampf. What are these morons thinking?

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The Rt. Rev. Brian Marsh, Presiding Bishop of the Anglican Church in America, has decided the ACA cannot accept Pope Benedict’s offer, via Anglicanorum Coetibus, of an ordinariate wherein Anglicans may be received into the Catholic Church but still preserve much of their worship tradition. The reason for rejection of this remarkable offer from the Pope, it seems, is His Grace’s horrifying discovery that when one is received into the Catholic Church one becomes (brace yourself) Catholic. Nobody told him, I guess.

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Ms. Abramson, 57, said that as a born-and-raised New Yorker, she considered being named editor of The Times to be like “ascending to Valhalla.”

“In my house growing up, The Times substituted for religion,” she said. “If The Times said it, it was the absolute truth.”

Well … that explains a lot.

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Students banned from a Central Coast school for wearing a white t-shirt. On Wednesday, Soquel High School suspended at least two students. The students say it’s because of allegations, they’re part of a white supremacist group.

And of course if you ask school officials for an explanation they dodge any accountability by citing ‘student privacy rights’.

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Professor Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, author of Mau Moko: The World of Maori Tattoo, described Mr Whitmill’s claims of ownership as insufferable arrogance. “It is astounding that a Pakeha tattooist who inscribes an African American’s flesh with what he considers to be a Maori design has the gall to claim that design as his intellectual property,” she said.

Be careful when you sue, for someone might sue you.

Charlie Stross, socialist, seems unaware of the connection between his politics and those of the Yellow Peril.

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Gotta love Australians.

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“Explain something modern/Internet based to someone who lived and died before 1900.” When faced with that prompt for a design class, Rachel Walsh, a student at Cardiff School of Art and Design, elected to describe the Amazon Kindle e-reader to Charles Dickens. “I chose to explain the Kindle to Charles Dickens because I thought it could’ve been a helpful piece of technology to have,” Walsh explained to me in an email. “He must’ve lugged a lot of heavy books around with him in his day!”

Check it out.

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Lesson: Bad taste pays when correctly monetized.

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Julien Moise envisioned a device that’s powered by blown air, displaying the time only when you want to see it.

We do these silly things so you don’t have to.

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Now all he has to do is change his name to ‘Barack’.

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Well, of course. What else could she do with it?

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Lyralisa Stevens was born as a male, but for years has received estrogen therapy in the process to become female. Stevens was convicted in 2002 for murdering a woman in San Bernardino over a $400 clothing debt.

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The 34-year-old, from the island, regularly features Carl Douglas’s 1974 number one hit in his set when he performs at the Driftwood Beach Bar in Sandown.

But after striking up the melody in front of customers at the weekend he noticed a man of Chinese origin walking past with his mother, making gestures at him and taking a picture on his mobile phone.

He said that he later received a telephone call from police – while he was dining in a Chinese restaurant – asking him to meet officers about the incident.

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President Obama declared today’s 41st annual Earth Day proof of America’s ecological and conservation spirit—then completed a three-day campaign-style trip logging 10,666 miles on Air Force One, eating up some 53,300 gallons at a cost of about $180,000. And that doesn’t include the fuel consumption of his helicopter, limo, or the 29 other vehicles that travel with that car.

Of course. Rules are for the little people.