Zom-Be-Gone

A great name for a zombie repellent, innit?

First things first: during my vacation from blogging in December, the zombie satellite came back to life. It's power supply fully drained, it died, then unexpectedly rebooted and came back to life. Ah, sweet resurrection! Sadly, my dreams of an interstellar apocalypse are now dashed.

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I perfected my Alan Rickman impression during the Christmas break. Huzzah! The trick, it turns out, is not to try and ape his performance as Severus Snape in the Harry Potter movies, which is surprisingly difficult, but rather to hearken back to his dizzyingly effective work as the bad guy in the first Diehard, specifically when he pulls down the sweatshirt of the dead guy and reads "Now I have a machine gun. Ho. Ho. Ho." It's on Youtube, but embedding is disabled; seek it out, you can play at home!

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I wrote last week about how my Dad is part of a crowd-sourcing find-a-grave community. Fresca commented that crowd-sourcing maked her feel optimistic about the human race. I'd agree. Here's more proof: KY Tunstsall asked her fans to recreate the music tracks behind her song "Glamour Puss" and submit them via Youtube. The result is a mash-up - video and audio - of their efforts. All that's left is her original vocal track; the music is all crowd-sourced. Pretty cool. Plus, she's kinda cute. Be sure and look for the guy playing the carrot.

Zombie Ants

I'm not sure how trustworthy this site is, but Ms. Dancehall sent me an article from there entitled "Zombie Ants Controlled by Fungus." How can you not love that headline?

The gist: a fungus in Thailand infects the brains of carpenter ants and gets them to climb down from the comfy tree canopies they prefer to hang out in. They descend into the low leaves, and then clamp down hard on the leaf stem right before they die. Why? Because it's the perfect spot for the fungus to grow.

After the ant dies, the fungus continues to grow inside it. By dissecting victims, Hughes and colleagues found that the parasite converts the ant's innards into sugars that help the fungus grow. But it leaves the muscles controlling the mandibles intact to make sure the ant keeps its death grip on the leaf.

I, for one, welcome our new fungal overlords.

Rambling (+ Zombies)

I cleaned and organized my shed this weekend.  I cannot overstate how much satisfaction this gave me.

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Mets swept the hapless Orioles this weekend.  First to last to first to last to second place.  Like being on a pogo stick.

Do they make pogo sticks anymore?  Are they considered too dangerous for children, and gone the way of the lawn dart?

Because I'd really like one.

I'd also like a didgeridoo, and have asked the Hux for one for my birthday.  We shall see.

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Enough rambling.  Here's some very dramatic video of the problem-plagued Japanese Hayabusa Asteroid explorer returning to Earth over Australia this morning.  The fireball is the probe burning up in the atmosphere; the little dot below and to the right is the hardened bit that contains asteroid samples.  It was recovered in the Australian outback this morning.

So, if things go all Andromeda Strain on us, and the zombie apocalypse begins, you'll know where it came from.