Why not a Nutria Rodeo?

The Baltimore Sun reports that the effort to eradicate nutria from Maryland's Eastern Shore is costing the federal government about $1 million a year. Maybe the locals should consider an annual Nutria Rodeo, like the one formerly held on Mobile Bay.

Weight for Height

While watching the Weight for Height competition at Saturday's Highland Festival in McHenry, Md., I was most impressed by the contestants' nonchalance after throwing. If I were able to heave a 56-pound weight straight into the air, I would not just stand there waiting for it to come down again. I would run out of the way, probably with my hands over my head, and likely squealing -- all probably frowned on at highland games.

That's Deep Creek Lake in the background.

Dignity, always dignity

Sydney and I took these photos of one another at Saturday's Highland Festival in McHenry, Md.

Our backyard rhododendrons

All animals are equal, but ...

A recent Associated Press story called the departure of two executives at Pfizer, the world's largest drug manufacturer, a sign that "even those at the top aren't immune to an ongoing companywide transformation."

What those at the top are immune to, however, is anything like the financial hardship faced by the 10,000 rank-and-file Pfizer employees slated to lose their jobs. According to Bloomberg, one departing executive is getting $3.3 million in severance pay, another $2 million.

"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."
-- George Orwell, Animal Farm

To the moon, Alice

According to a new survey of 4,824 Americans:

75 percent view the manned space program as vital to the international prestige of the United States.

71 percent oppose any cuts in NASA funding.

63 percent believe humans will establish a permanent lunar colony someday.

39 percent believe that will happen within 50 years.

41 percent would be willing to travel to the Moon if they could afford it.

32 percent would be willing to travel to Mars.

Chef Taylor, age 9

I love this May 20 Roanoke Times photo, by Eric Brady, of 9-year-old Taylor Maddox at the Young Chefs Academy in Salem, Va., but it doesn't seem to have made the online version of the story. Nice use of supplemental audio and video, though.

I know just what he means

"So far, it's been a long, short season."
-- Brian Cashman, general manager of the struggling New York Yankees, quoted in an AP article

"A deceased person" in an air duct

It's not quite the old urban legend about the dead Santa in the chimney, but students at an elementary school in Phoenix were sent home when a dead man was found inside an air duct. The letter sent home with the kids said authorities had discovered "a deceased person." Do you suppose the avoidance of the word "corpse" made it easier to take?

Zoning against windmills

As New Scientist has pointed out, backyard windmills are obvious household-by-household answers to the problems posed by fossil fuels. But The Associated Press reports that the biggest obstacles to these gadgets are local politicians and zoning ordinances. Mayor David Dorman of Melissa, Texas, for example,

said it might be unfair to allow some people to have a technology that is not available to others who do not have the money or the yard space.

Do you suppose the mayor also opposes every other sort of home improvement, however beneficial to the town as a whole, that might make the neighbors jealous?

The "monster hog" of Lost Creek

When Sydney and I first saw the published photo of the "monster hog" shot by an 11-year-old at Lost Creek Plantation, a commercial hunting preserve in Delta, Ala., our immediate reaction was, "The photo's fake." A knowing photographer could have placed the boy well behind the hog to create a trick of perspective that would have made the critter seem much bigger than it actually was. But there may be additional reasons to be skeptical of the photos posted by the kid's dad at MonsterPig.com, according to this exhaustive (and arguably exhausting) analysis.

There may be excellent reasons to be skeptical of the entire hunt, for that matter. The Anniston Star, one of the best small newspapers in Alabama (or anywhere else), reports that the hog's name was Fred, and it was farm-raised and pampered by Rhonda and Phil Blissitt of Fruithurst, Ala. Though Phil Blissitt denies it ever was a pet, he and his wife do say Fred liked to snack on canned sweet potatoes and play with the Blissitts' grandchildren.

The Blissitts recently sold all their swine, and Fred was bought by Eddy Borden, the owner of Lost Creek Plantation. Only a few days after Fred left the Blissitt farm, he was pursued by a pack of armed Lost Creek customers who paid for an exciting, authentic hunting experience. The adults with their high-powered rifles let young Jamison Stone have the honor; he shot Fred repeatedly with a .50-caliber Smith & Wesson Model 500 Revolver (which the manufacturer calls "the most powerful production revolver in the world") over the course of a three-hour chase, before finally delivering the coup de grace.

Readers in other parts of the country will marvel that a student at a private school called Christian Heritage Academy would pump a farm-raised hog full of .50-caliber bullets in the name of sport and Southern manhood, but I'm from South Carolina, so this doesn't surprise me at all.

Reliable witnesses

The next time I read about someone who sincerely believes he saw something uncanny in the sky, I'll remember this story from the May 31 Cumberland Times-News. A U.S. Navy pilot spooked locals by flying low over the area so that his dad, who lives in Frostburg, could get a good photo of his plane. Here's the crucial paragraph, emphasis mine:

The appearance of the aircraft set off a barrage of telephone calls to the airport, law enforcement and the Cumberland Times-News from concerned citizens, some of whom reported seeing two aircraft when in fact it was only one.

I'm sure at least some of those folks will continue to insist they saw two planes (or, as the years pass, three or more planes), despite the official government denials.

Cause of death

This obituary in today's Cumberland Times-News includes a cause of death I've never seen in an obit before:

BEDFORD, Pa. -- Jessica R. Sellers, 24, of Bedford, died at 11:35 a.m., Tuesday, May 29, 2007, at home after a courageous battle with anorexia.

Amid their grief, Jessica's relatives did an admirable thing in publicly declaring what she died of. The more open we become about this all-too-common illness, the closer we come to eradicating it.

Reading further, I see that Jessica played on the Frostburg State softball team, so I hope the student newspaper, The Bottom Line, does an article about her. That, too, would help.

The Hotts check in

Megan Hott of Keyser, W.Va., last seen here wearing a "No one cares about your blog" T-shirt, writes:

this is too weird...

Whether this counts as evidence that she now does care about my blog is open to debate, of course.

Meanwhile, Trent Hergenrader's insistence that "There's no way a long-haired blond in high school has the last name 'Hott'" prompts Megan Hott's sister to write:

There is a Megan Hott because I am her sister :) ... Amanda Hott ... Just wanted to inform everyone that there are girls w/the last name Hott and they do go to high school, although I recently graduated. ;)

(Megan, you're also on my hero Barry Johnson's blog, and you're the subject of this follow-up post on my blog as well.)

My family connection to Vonnegut recedes, alas

In April, I posted this:

My family owns about 80 acres of woodland in Saluda County, S.C., acreage on which -- I grew up being told -- U.S. Army troops performed battlefield maneuvers as part of their training before being shipped overseas in World War II. The cabin used as a command headquarters was still standing in my youth, and we'd stay in it for a week or more each summer.

I found out this week that I had misremembered the family story. The battlefield maneuvers took place not in the mid-1940s but in the late 1950s, because my brother, Allen, born in 1944, remembers visiting the encampment with our father, and seeing the camouflaged soldiers emerging from the woods like ghosts. (My brother also reports the cabin is still standing, and in surprisingly good shape.)

So those maneuvers couldn't have been the ones narrated by Billy Pilgrim in Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse-Five, as I speculated earlier. Yes, the Trafalmadorians would say my sequence-of-events obsession is naively linear -- but the fiction vs. non-fiction distinction is a stumbling block, too.

I see now that my original post appeared April 1, but I didn't realize I was April-fooling, honest.

More on Jamie Bishop

Here's Paul Di Filippo's report from the Georgia memorial service, with information about a second fund that's accepting contributions.

Here's Michael Bishop's letter to Locus.

Here's a tribute by Jack Slay Jr. It concludes with a years-old poem by Michael about Jamie -- which has a new resonance now, alas.

Not-so-amazing coincidences

Perennially popular before the Internet, and downright inescapable since the Internet, are lists of "amazing coincidences," such as this one recently posted at OddWeek.com. Seldom are any objective sources provided, other than Ripley's and the like, but sometimes a quick Google is enough to render the supposed amazing coincidence not so amazing at all, and maybe not even coincidental. For example:

Months after the Titanic sank, a tramp steamer was traveling through the foggy Atlantic with only a young boy on watch. It came into his head that it had been thereabouts that the Titanic had sunk, and he was suddenly terrified by the thought of the name of his ship -- the Titanian. Panic-stricken, he sounded the warning. The ship stopped, just in time: a huge iceberg loomed out of the fog directly in their path. The Titanian was saved.

The Encyclopedia Titanica, however, points out that ex-sailor William Reeve's account of his "amazing" premonition, written 32 years after the fact, flatly contradicts newspaper accounts at the time that put the Titanian's brush with the berg quite a ways from the spot where the Titanic went down. It was "thereabouts" only in the sense of "also in the North Atlantic." (Incidentally, the Titanian incident was not "months after the Titanic sank," but in 1935, which was 23 years after the disaster.) Given the frequency with which ships encountered bergs in the North Atlantic in the 19th and 20th centuries, is Titanian's encounter a generation later so remarkable? Here's another:

In Detroit sometime in the 1930s, a young (if incredibly careless) mother must have been eternally grateful to a man named Joseph Figlock. As Figlock was walking down the street, the mother's baby fell from a high window onto Figlock. The baby's fall was broken and both man and baby were unharmed. A stroke of luck on its own, but a year later, the very same baby fell from the very same window onto poor, unsuspecting Joseph Figlock as he was again passing beneath. And again, they both survived the event.

This one seems to be partially true, as Time magazine actually mentioned the incidents in a roundup column in its Oct. 17, 1938 issue, saying the second fall occurred "last fortnight." But according to Time, the falls involved two different children, two different windows, two different buildings, two different streets -- which renders the story much more plausible, if considerably less amazing. I wonder how many small children did fall from high-rise windows, in the days before day care and air conditioning. (It occasionally happens still.) Moreover, Time reports that Mr. Figlock worked as a street sweeper, and that both incidents occurred while he was on the job. Someone whose job requires him to be in the street all the time is clearly at greater risk of being hit by anything that falls from windows; one wonders what else landed on Mr. Figlock during his career, other than these two celebrated kids.

In a useful essay on coincidence, Dennis McFadden of the University of Texas (and of the Austin Society To Oppose Pseudoscience) writes: "Generally, people tend to underestimate grossly the probability of any event that happens to them, especially one perceived as 'strange.'"

Yes, Mr. Figlock's twofer is remarkable even without the embroidery, and yes, it's fun to learn that the victim of cannibalism in the celebrated 1884 case of the ill-fated yacht the Mignonette had the same name as the victim of cannibalism in similar circumstances in Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (Chapter 12), published 46 years earlier -- but one still must point out that Richard Parker is a fairly common name in the English-speaking world, and that cannibalism among desperate seamen long predated Poe.

A maritime mystery

Here's a puzzler in Australia: a catamaran found adrift off the Great Barrier Reef, its three crew members missing, its engine and computer still running, food on the table ready to eat -- and the rubber fenders deployed, as when docking or pulling alongside another boat. Judging from the photo, the Kaz II's sail was shredded, too.

Jose Luis de Jesus Miranda

Here's a recent AP story about Jose Luis de Jesus Miranda, founder of the Growing in Grace church in Miami, who has thousands of followers in South Florida and Latin America. He calls himself the Antichrist, saying his teachings supplant those of Christ, and calls his followers Antichrists as well. Says one observer: "He wants attention."

It's not all Masterpiece Theatre in Britain

Dirk Benedict, Dwight Schultz and Mr. T will reunite on the British paranormal show Most Haunted in an attempt to contact George Peppard, their late co-star on The A-Team.