Think it’s all been done? Nothing left to accomplish on the world stage if you haven’t won an Olympic medal by the time you’re 12 (even though the minimum age is older than that?)  You just need to get a little more creative – like this guy that just broke the lawnmower speed record.  Now admittedly it would take a bit to claim this title but there have got to be others – fastest speed on a pogo stick or unicycle.  What about a lawnmower going backward?

As for all the children out exploring the world on their own, more power to them but I’d rather set records at the other end of the spectrum – oldest person to sail around the world, oldest person to climb Mt. Everest and the like. That way I won’t have to rest on any laurels.

For the most part requests under the Freedom of Information Act (or local equivalent) are fairly low on the entertainment scale unless you are really into conspiracy theories. That was until a recent request in Great Britain made the news when someone requested information regarding the official tracking of Sea monsters. I’m not sure if it’s a good or bad thing that they are not actually keeping track of their sea monsters; it seems very untidy not to do so.

While I don’t know if the site WhatDoTheyKnow.com was used for the sea monster request it certainly has been used to file both ordinary and quirky requests within Great Britain such as an inquiry into Symbols on passport covers – when was the last time you looked at yours?

It may be awhile before America catches up on this one – the oddest story regarding a request for information in the US involved the CIA requesting its own information back. Who needs TV shows?

I’m not much for scatological humor and really hoping this is the one and only post on the subject. I just couldn’t pass by the recent discovery of the pitcher plant shaped like a toilet that’s actually designed for that purpose, at least by tree shrews.  Just proves you can find just about anything in Borneo.

On the plus side, if this doesn’t get an 8-12 year old boy into botany, nothing will.

So the exorcised ghost auction I mentioned last Friday has concluded and it turns out the going rate is just under $1000 US per ghost.  Which is interesting given that most people (including the seller)  want to get rid of ghosts not add them to the family. Of course, maybe the buyer just really wanted a vial of pale blue water and couldn’t come up with one any other way.

I did a search on the same site and could not come up with any aliens for sale which seems a pity  – anyone that’s watched enough Star Trek knows there are all kinds of aliens without a visible physical presence…

It seems like every four years the media wakes up and remembers curling is an Olympic sport and starts the same jokes all over again. I can’t really blame t hem as I once sat through a collegiate curling practice – 20 years later and I would still rate that experience up there with Vogon poetry

2010 though, is whole new Olympic year thanks to the Norwegians and their crazy pants You know you’re on to something in curling when other teams are laughing at you (they’re pretty used to everyone else rolling their eyes..) And the argyle is actually in keeping with the sport when you consider that both argyle and curling are credited to Scotland – the once place where fashion dictates wearing argyle socks with a plaid kilt as long as the colors match.

If these look like your kind of pants, you can order them online for a mere $89 – however the extensive press coverage means they are now on back order and you can expect to see red and grey argyle pants just about everywhere soon, including on the King of Norway.

The big questions – do the pants help you win? Well at this point Norway is in the semi-finals so they don’t make you lose.

So when the woman in England’s Midlands got the official note that her gnomes had to go, did the official really think they were a fire hazard or just seized an opportunity to reduce the population by two?  (The gnome owner has prevailed – garden gnomes not currently deemed a fire hazard…)  It does seem amazing how many people love them (25 million garden gnomes in Germany alone?) and hate them e.g. the gnome factory in New Zealand that was destroyed by arson.  Reading the Wikipedia entry on garden gnomes doesn’t really clear much up – except that you will know more about garden gnomes than anyone really ought to such as the last survivor of the first set introduced to England is insured for approximately 1.5 million dollars. Why?

It’s all over the news.  Okay, mostly in the odd and bizarre section but when even NPR reports on it, it’s at least legitimate. It’s the story of the Massachusetts high school that has banned the apparently disruptive word ‘meep’ on school grounds. It doesn’t take much imagination to calculate the annoyance factor of a bunch of teenagers meeping all the time but they tend to do a lot of things that are annoying to adults. If this is the worst those kids are getting up to, I would think the administration would be sighing with joy and relief.

The interesting thing is that the majority of the press is attributing the word to Beeker  from the muppets, but it turns out from the NPR interview that this didn’t have anything directly to do with either Beeker or the Roadrunner, both of whom use ‘meep’ quite frequently.  Which is really too bad, because if this had been a Beeker uprising, they could now all start mambo’ing in the hallways in protest (one of Beeker’s lesser known talents):

When I used my metal detector for the first time, I found a piece of tin foil and a nail – both minted within the last 50 years which would qualify them as collectibles  -  not even antiques.  Unlike the guy that recently found a small iron-age hoard of gold in Scotland. I would once again like to complain about the complete and utter lack of ancient gold hoards in the United States.  I’d even settle for something a bit newer, say Anglo-Saxon, like the lovely work inlayed with garnets over gold.  If anyone has some extra treasure left over….?

If you had 3 million dollars would you buy something tangible (like an island) or blow it all on four days in a space hotel?  At least 43 people have voted for space so far even though there is no mention of the food, and probably for a good reason.  There is a teasing reference on the Galactic Suite website to ‘space sports’ – why I immediately think of 0-g dodgeball I don’t know.

Even if most of the userbase departed Second Life when gambling disappeared, businesses and organizations have been going the other way – to Second Life and elsewhere in cyberspace.  And they need to be ‘virtually’ staffed apparently by real people.

Which means avatars.

Which means someone is getting upset that the avatar in the next cubicle is showing her knees, or has a political statement on his t-shirt, or is wearing fairy wings.  So instead of the corporate dress code that had documented who can wear walking shorts and when (yes, I worked there once)  going away as workers telecommute and otherwise avoid seeing each other, it will now be expanded and have to cover a whole lot of territory not usually part of any HR manual. Like fur, and wings, and extra arms and legs, and everything else.  Rumor has it most companies will have a cyber dress code in the next five years….