Hi Tweets,

Well, here's some humorless intellectual stuff from the latest issue of the
Georgia Straight, Vancouver's free news and entertainment weekly, a wrap-up
of 1997 news items.

Baby's got dimples
A pair of ducks set up their nest at the Saskatoon Golf and Country Club in
order to hatch two golf balls they had mistaken for eggs. The female grebe
(sic) wouldn't let anyone near the nest. "It'll be a long summer for that
bird, eh?" said golfer Arnie Wudrick.

Building a better mosh pit
David Merrell finished first in the Virginia state (sic) science fair for
his experiment showing the effects of music upon mice. After running a maze
in an average time of 10 minutes, the mice were divided into two groups that
were exposed for 10 hours per day of either heavy metal or classical music.
After three weeks, the classically educated mice ran the maze in 90 seconds,
and the metalhead mice ran it in 30 minutes. Merrell had to cut his
experiment short because "all the hard-rock mice killed each other. None of
the classical mice did that."

The DMZ of Eden
Pennsylvania State University biologist Ke Chung Kim wrote in the journal
Science that the two-and-a-half-mile-wide demilitarized zone separating
North and South Korea along their 150-mile border should become a nature
preserve because the 40-plus years without human intervention have produced
a unique ecosystem of rare animal and plant life. (I'd wonder if for many of
them getting blown up by mines is a natural part of the life cycle--M)

Jonathan Livingston Asshole
New Scientist magazine reported that seagulls in Toronto have learned to
guide migrating birds into collisions with buildings in order to "feed off
the corpses."

A fowl vice
"Eyeliner has been important in my life. If ten chickens have to die to make
one drag queen happier, then so be it. (--Filmmaker John Waters on testing
cosmetics on animals)

They were threatening to evolve
"We were advised to take them out because they were very dangerous. And that
is what we did." (--Const. Pierre Robichaud, of the Quebec Provincial
Police, on the shooting of two escaped rhesus monkeys on a golf course near
Montreal.)

Don't ask
"She's missing a couple of teeth, which is to be expected after all that
partying." (--Maggie Caunter, on the return of Stiffanie the skeleton, which
was stolen from Vancouver General's rehabilitation department and later seen
in attendance at a student party.)

Better to light a mouse than curse the darkness
By injecting mouse embryos with jellyfish DNA, geneticists in Japan's Osaka
Institute developed a strain of mice that glow green under ultraviolet light.

The hell you say
The commissioners of Kieberg County, Texas, voted unanimously that the
official greeting at the county courthouse will be 'heaven-o', a "symbol of
peace, friendship, and welcome". Leonso Canales led the drive and has
promoted the greeting for years. "I see "hell" in hello. It's disguised by
the 'o', but once you see it it will slap you in the face."

Finally, for those people who don't vote because they suffer from the common
misconception their vote is meaningless, there's this:

Stiffed in returns
British Conservative MP Rupert Allison didn't tip restaurant staff for a
meal on election eve. The BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) reported
that all 14 staffers decided to vote for his opponent, who won by 12 votes.

Oh me. What a world. Have a happy new year, everyone.


Michael Price A brave world, Sir,
Vancouver BC Canada full of religion, knavery and change;
mprice at mindlink.net we shall shortly see better days.
-Aphra Behn (1640-1689)