A survey found that 67 percent of pet owners say they understand what their animals are saying, while 62 percent say their pets understand them when they speak to them. Of course it’s possible that most of those polled didn’t understand the questions since they were spoken in English.
A Harris Interactive poll found that nearly half of the women surveyed would rather give up sex for two weeks than lose their Internet access, while 80 percent of men said all of the sex they had in the past two weeks came from the Internet.
If you apply for a mortgage you fill out a five-page Uniform Residential Loan Application. If you want a collage loan, you fill out the eight-page FAFSA application. Want a few billion dollars from the government’s Capital Purchase Program, better known as the bank bailout? Just fill out a simple two-page form. It’s easy, especially since the first page is just bank contact information. Download your copy here!
An Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at President George Bush during a news conference in Baghdad yesterday is in custody and being tested for alcohol and drugs to determine why he would waste a perfectly good pair of shoes that way.
When Joseph Saunders, CEO of Visa, spoke at a Goldman Sachs financial services conference the other day, he admitted that he’d lost his wallet on the way to New York and said, “It’s rather embarrassing when somebody steals my credit cards.” NOTE TO THIEF: Don’t use it unless prison is everywhere you want to be.
The Italian Agriculture Department has come up with a way to help shore up Parmesan prices while helping the needy—buy cheese and give it away. They plan on buying 6.6 million pounds of Parmigiano Reggiano and Grana Padano, then give it away so the Italian poor don’t have to stoop to buying Kraft grated Parmesan in little green shaker cans. If it works, expect the U.S. government to follow suit by handing out Velveeta and Cheez Whiz.
As if 2008 hasn’t felt extraordinarily long already—heck, we already had Feb. 29th added as leap day—it now turns out there’s going to be a leap second added at the end of the year. In order to put clocks in synch with the rotation of the Earth, the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service in Paris—yes, there is such a group—has decreed that on December 31 at 23 hours 59 minutes and 59 seconds, clocks will pause while an extra second is added to the year. Just what we need, one more second of George Bush in office.
Gypsy Lawson of Spokane, Washington, was convicted yesterday of smuggling. It seems when she flew from Thailand to Los Angeles in November 2007 she got through customs with a sedated rhesus monkey hidden under her blouse by saying she was pregnant. She was caught after taking the monkey to a shopping mall and telling a store clerk how she got it. The monkey is at a primate rescue facility in Oregon. Lawson may be behind bars soon too. Just another reminder that evolution is still just a theory.
When Florida congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen received a phone call from a man who said he was Barack Obama congratulating her on her re-election and saying he was looking forward to working with her as a member of the House Foreign Affairs committee, she let it go on for about a minute before telling him he was a better impersonator than the guy on Saturday Night Live and hanging up. A little while later a man who claimed to be Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s chief of staff, called to say it really had been the President-elect. She hung up on him, too. After a call from the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, she realized it really had been Obama and Emanuel so she took the next call. Maybe it would have gone smoother had Obama not started his conversation by asking if she had Prince Albert in a can.
If you’re late for work or school in New York City because the subway was delayed, you can get a written excuse from the NYC Transit Authority. The only problem is you have to call them and it takes a week or two to get the letter. But not for long. They’re working on an online system that will email the excuse to your boss or teacher. This could spell the end to excuses like “the dog ate my subway token,” “the conductor’s grandmother died,” and “I thought today was Saturday.”
Football fans in LA, New York, and Boston will be able to watch tonight’s football game between the Oakland Raiders and San Diego Chargers in 3-D, though they’ll have to give up the convenience of their La-Z-Boy recliner and go to a movie theater to do it. And wear 3-D glasses with polarized lenses, though that shouldn’t be a problem since most of them are used to wearing beer goggles while watching the game anyway.
The Ten Thousand Waves spa in Santa Fe is offering something a little different in the way of facials. Their Nightingale Cleansing Mask, which is supposedly used by geishas in Japan, contains a powder made from sanitized bird droppings they say draws out bacteria and breaks down dead skin cells more gently than acid peels. In addition, it leaves your face geisha white if you don’t manage to wash it all off, makes you instant friends with every cat in the neighborhood, and is much more convenient than trying it at home with live nightingales.
A survey taken by The Josephson Institute found that during the past year, 30% of high school students have shoplifted, 64% have cheated on a test, and 36% have used the Internet to plagiarize an assignment. What we need to learn from these survey results is that our moral infrastructure is unsound and in serious need of repair. This is not a time to lament and whine but to take thoughtful, positive actions. And no, those last two sentences aren’t word for word what Michael Josephson said in the newspaper article. Honestly.
According to an announcement today, the National Bureau of Economic Research says the United States entered a recession in December 2007. They apologize for the late notification, saying they’re working hard to fix their crystal ball, which has been stuck in reverse since August 1987.
An AP story in the San Francisco Chronicle describes the international space station’s Thanksgiving dinner: “The smoked turkey resembles sliced deli meat but stiffer, the candied yams are bland inside, the green beans taste like they’ve been microwaved to death, and the corn bread stuffing has a broth-heavy, institutional flavor.” Other than being irradiated, freeze-dried, vacuum-packed into plastic pouches, and served with Tang, it sounds like Thanksgiving at my mother’s cousin Ronnie’s house when I was growing up.
Italy’s right-wing MSI-Fiamma Tricolore party is offering 1,500 euros (US$1,900) to parents in the Basilicata region of the country who name their babies after Benito Mussolini or his wife Rachele, saying the names are “at risk of extinction.” Parents will get an additional $278.42 if they also give the child the middle name of Adolph, Idi, Tojo, or Pol Pot.
A few weeks ago Vietnam’s Health Ministry said they wanted to implement a plan to prohibit people from driving motorbikes whose chests measure less than 28 inches, are shorter than 4’8″, or who weigh less than 88 pounds. There was a big outcry from the public, who envisioned the police pulling over female drivers to measure their breasts. The Ministry decided not to push the proposal, saying the police would just have to keep checking out women’s breasts and estimate their size as they always have.
Chubby Mikey, the 532-pound Memphis man who won last year’s Understated Nickname of the Year award, is taking orders for his 2009 naked pin-up calendar. While not as cute as Puppycam, it does help fulfill any fat fetish you may have, proves that a wide-angle lens doesn’t slim down a subject like a carnival mirror, and is a great appetite suppressant when hung on the refrigerator door. Oh yeah, it reminds you what the date is too.
When the CEOs of Ford, Chrysler, and GM flew to Washington to hold out their tin cups and ask Congress for a bailout, they all took private jets. Separate ones. This caused Rep. Gary Ackerman to comment that “It’s almost like seeing a guy show up at the soup kitchen in high hat and tuxedo.” Like a lot of big corporations, the three companies have policies requiring their CEOs to travel in private jets “for safety reasons.” Hey, you wouldn’t want them to ride in one of those unsafe commercial airplanes like the rest of us do, now would you? If they were really serious about getting a handout they would have carpooled in one of their cars. If they consider them safe, that is.
Astronaut Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper was floating outside the international space station trying to unstick a gummed-up joint when a grease gun exploded in her tool bag. As she started wiping the grease off, the tool bag slipped from her grip and floated off with all her tools inside. It was last seen heading for Jupiter where it will become the planet’s 64th moon, to be named Stanley Snap-on.
